Shakes Over Planes?

Well, they can't quantify whether or not the latest terrorist air threat affected attendance of the new 9-11 movie or not. "World Trade Center" earned $19 million over the weekend - a far better number than "United 93" opened at in April - and has made about $27 million since debuting Wednesday. Hard to tell whether Thursday's liquid bomb scare kept anyone from going or got more people interested in the movie.

But then, "WTC" mostly takes place in a hole in the ground. The real test of whether this new round of air travel jitters can influence theater attendance will start this Friday, when the much anticipated "Snakes on a Plane" finally opens.

A few weeks ago, I presciently (in hindsight, anyway) asked "SoaP's" director, David Ellis, if he thought all the loony Interntet fan mania his serpents-in-the-sky thriller was pre-generating had anything to do with a desire to psychologically innoculate ourselves against air paranoia by championing /goofing on a cheesy fantasy jetliner disaster.

"It could be," noted Ellis ("Cellular," "Final Destination 2"). "Films like 'United 93,' 'World Trade Center,' I'm not ready, personally, to see those movie, though I understand that they're really powerful stories that should be told. This movie, I think, is fun and it doesn't hit home because it's non-specific about a certain event that destroyed America. At the same time, this movie has been nine years in the making; it was just about to be greenlit when 9-11 happened. Then they said, 'We're not makin' a friggin' movie about terrorists putting snakes on a plane.'

"I worry about it. I don't know what the box office is gonna do. But to me, the box office isn't as important as that the people that go have fun, that they escape what's going on in the world - because it's f---ing horrible right now - and that they actually have fun."