Few films in recent history arrived with more pre-release hype than the cheerfully goofy horror flick "Snakes on a Plane," and few similarly high profile projects have earned more disappointing box office returns in the weekend of release. "Snakes," despite its cult status among internet geeks and the young males who represent the core audience for feature films, earned barely $15 million at the box office... about half the grosses predicted by many savvy observers. Conventional wisdom (endlessly recycled in the prestige press) suggested that the flaccid performance of the Samuel L. Jackson passengers-in-jeapordy epic demonstrated the inability of the internet to power a movie to blockbuster status, but the true nature of the film's failure contained a deeper lesson.

  According to many accounts, the producers of "Snakes" originally intended to make their film a PG-13 rated romp---a B-picture, shamelessly silly tale about slithering critters released in mid flight across the Pacific in order to bring down the plane and kill a key witness against a gangland kingpin. In fact, almost everything about the project suggested that it would squeeze box-office dollars out of boys between the ages of 12-and-15 like a giant boa constrictor -- but then the internet activists insisted on more racy content and an "R" rating, and the producers inexplicably followed their lead. The filmmakers went back for several days of new material--- including a scene of pot-smoking and steamy, bare-breasted sex in an airplane bathroom, and Samuel L. Jackson's notorious line: "Enough is Enough! I've had it with these mother%#@! snakes on this mother@#%! plane!"

  They thereby got the R-rating they wanted, and lost the youthful audience they needed. As long ago as 1992, my book HOLLYWOOD VS. AMERICA included a groundbreaking study that showed that an R-rating hurts box office performance-- and makes it much less likely for adults-only fare to recoup its investment. More than a dozen major studies (by distinguished universities and savvy marketing firms) since my initial argument have all confirmed the phenomenon I observed: G, PG, and PG-13 films reliably and substantially outperform R - films at the box office.

   The harsh rating (demanded by the bloggers and cultists who helped determine the final shape of the film) probably proved particularly punishing for this particular movie. Middle aged women, for instance, will feel little attraction to a project called "Snakes on a Plane"--- in fact females of all ages felt largely repulsed. Female problems with snakes go all the way back to the Bible (remember the curse of Eve?) so that the producers needed to rely on adolescent boys of all ages-- and the R-rating made it much harder to draw kids from the low end of that spectrum. My fourteen-year-old son, Danny, for instance, felt a powerful inclination to go out and see the movie with his two sleep-over friends this Sunday night, but I wouldn't permit it. It's rated R for good reason. Instead of "Snakes," Danny and his posse rented DVD's of "Bruce Almighty" and Clint Eastwood's "Bronco Billy" and enjoyed a more age appropriate (and cheaper) evening of entertainment.

  After all these years of evidence, it's amazing that Hollywood pilots still insist on flying directly into unnecessary turbulence-- getting an R-rating when it can only hurt their prospects for success. Ultimately, it was the obscenities and the sleaziness as much as the snakes that crashed this particular plane.