Oh, Hollywood. Is there any tragedy you won’t exploit for fun and profit? Apparently not. Word has reached us that the rights to a book about the Boston Marathon Bombing – which occurred a whopping three months ago – have been snapped up by The Fighter writers Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson. We’ll get to relive all those terrible moments once more, only this time it won’t be real.
The book that the script will be based on has not even been published yet. Written by Casey Sherman and Boston Herald reporter Dave Wedge, the book covers the Boston Marathon Bombing and the subsequent manhunt for the Tsarenev brothers. Given that the younger brother has not even been put on trial yet, this could get very ugly, very fast.
Yes, tragedies are inherently dramatic. Yes, this one has all the hallmarks of a blockbuster. But what next? Why not make a movie about Sandy Hook, and the slaughter of innocent children and teachers? How about a film examining James Holmes and the Aurora shootings? I mean, tragedy makes it big at the box office, after all.
This seems offensively cynical to me. By making a tragedy into a source of entertainment, we might claim that we’re trying to heal wounds or help the public deal with grief and fear. But what we seem to be doing more often than not is turning an act of real violence into an act of fake violence. The tragedy seems less real because we can make it into a movie. It’s still a piece of entertainment, and we’ll still buy popcorn to watch it.
In any case, we’ll have to wait and see what Tamasy and Johnson come up with for a Boston Marathon Bombing film. Just look at those images from Boston. Inherently cinematic, right? Would it be too much to expect if they filmed it in 3D? Why, then it could be like we’re actually there!
