Some clueless critic and "The Hurt Locker."

[RichA]

Look at this quote from some critic writing for CNN about the year's
best movies.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/01/best.worst.movies.2009/index.html

7. "The Hurt Locker"

The best-reviewed American movie of the year is an intense,
unflinching suspense film about a bomb disposal expert in Iraq (a
career-making performance from Jeremy Renner). Why did it bottom out
at $13 million at the box office? The distressing scene in which
Renner cut into the corpse of a booby-trapped dead child may have had
something to do with it. That kind of courage is rare in movies, but
there's a smaller market for honesty.

IDIOT! Does this guy KNOW how few theatres the movie was released
to? It got fewer rooms than the average art film and it managed to do
$13,000,000.
The movie was shafted. In-part because Americans were SICK of the
unending parade of anti-American, pro-leftist Iraq war films (none of
them did much, even with much wider releases) and in-part because I'm
convinced some group in Hollywood militated against it to keep it out
of theatres. Not everyone has Mel Gibson's pull (or money) and can
get politically (in Hollywood) unpopular movies released on a wide
scale.

Another critic with a different view:

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/06/entertainment/et-word6

With domestic ticket sales of more than $7 million to date, "The Hurt
Locker" is hardly a blockbuster, and isn't going to help stem the
summer's plummeting sales, in which box-office returns have been down
four straight weeks compared with a year ago. Yet Bigelow and
screenwriter Mark Boal's film is on track to gross $15 million or more
in its total theatrical run -- an exceptionally strong performance
given the film's subject matter and its absence of recognizable stars.

Just seven weeks into its run, "The Hurt Locker" has performed better
than most recent dramas about Middle East conflict. Acquired by Summit
Entertainment, the new studio behind the "Twilight" franchise, at last
year's Toronto International Film Festival for $1.5 million, "The Hurt
Locker" already has outperformed 2007's "In the Valley of Elah" ($6.8
million domestic theatrical gross), will soon go by 2008's "Stop-
Loss" ($10.9 million) and even could surpass 2007's "Lions for
Lambs" ($15 million), which starred the A-list triumvirate of Tom
Cruise, Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. "The Hurt Locker's" most
crucial role -- the fearless, adrenaline-addicted bomb defuser Staff
Sgt. William James -- is played by Jeremy Renner, a veteran character
actor perhaps best known for appearing in the horror sequel "28 Weeks
Later."