Cinematical

My point is that prior to In the Name of the King, despite having numerous failures, he had no trouble securing a semi-large release for it. That one failure wouldn't change it so that only four theatres would accept his next movie.

I mean, lets face the facts here. His movies do bad. But for almost 100% of the theatres to turn his film down is ridiculous. It points to censorship. Theatres in my neighborhood are still playing 2 month old flops (Run Fatboy Run, Superhero Movie) that probably get a few audience members a day. Postal might not have gotten the 1500 theatres he expected, but it should have had no trouble securing 100 at least.

Postal was banned from these theatres because of the content. Full frontal male nudity, lampooning 9/11, babies being shot. That's why. If not, theatres would have at least allowed him to rent the space, as they would make guaranteed money off of that.

see that's the thing, it wasn't banned, it was never picked up. It's not censorship if the theatre owners know there will be backlash from the customer base because they chose to carry the film. Uwe's business model doesn't work anymore now that his tax shelter is gone. He couldn't afford to rent the auditoriums to screen his film in anyway, in order to rent a house most chains charge you for every ticket in the auditorium. That means an average size auditrium would cost him $27,000 just for the weekend, just one. You can break down the math from there, but the money just doesn't exist. It would be censorship if someone told the theatres they couldn't play the movie, but that's not the case, they CHOSE not to because there is no money for them, remember he doesn't have a distributor anymore so there is no-one making the kind of deals for him that most distributors make such as the "you're gonna lose money on this film, but we'll give you the big one at a better rate" deal. I have a fairly intimate knowledge of these systems. I can assure you, the decision is purely financial.

It wasn't banned by the most literal sense of the word, but it was boycotted and it was due to the content, not financial reasons. As I've stated, theatres in my neighborhood are still playing movies like "Run Fatboy Run" and "Deception". I guarantee "Postal" will make more on a per theatre average this weekend than those are. I'd buy your claim about it being financial if it wasn't for the fact that I work in a theatre and they constantly get movies that are obviously going to bomb. Hell, we got a movie called Kenny about a plumber, which got about ten people per showing and it was from a no-name distributer that couldn't have bargained down prices.

I can't speak on the rental business (I know nothing about that), but I'm positive this has to do with the content of the film, and not the financial aspects.

It may have opened on just over 1,000 screens, but it only has grosses posted for 2 weekends. That means the theates and the studios all lost money on that movie. It has nothing to do with some grand censorship conspiracy and everything to do with him not being worth the paper he's printed on.