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Now that Batman Begins opening has proved that it isn't going to save the industry from its prolonged slump (compared to last year's box office numbers), the LAT takes its turn ruminating about what's going wrong this year—i.e., the expensive flops, the popularity of staying home and watching DVDs instead of peeling asses from sofas to go to the theater, etc, etc. In the middle of the hand-wringing, a producer reminds us that in this age of light-speed bad buzz and massive opening weekend theater counts, every bomb has a very short fuse:

More worrisome, executives say, is the industry's penchant for flooding the market on opening weekend, often putting a would-be blockbuster in more than 4,000 theaters. Beyond the added expense of those wide releases, the strategy leaves little time for curiosity to build for good movies and accelerates bad buzz, which can now be passed with viral speed on the Internet.

"Now at midnight on Friday evening, you're dead or alive," said Lucy Fisher, a producer of the upcoming "Bewitched" and a 30-year veteran of the industry. "However long it took to make the movie, by Friday night, except for Academy[-Award-type] movies, your fate gets cast."

We should probably mention that Bewitched opens this Friday, and if the buzz is to be believed, everyone at Sony should probably cram into the lot's bomb shelter to prevent unnecessary loss of life when it goes off at midnight.