Is America Ready for Another Iraq War Movie?

March 28, 2008 — -- Fans of hot, young Hollywood actor Ryan Phillippe are waiting with bated breath for the opening of his new movie, "Stop-Loss," but everywhere else in Tinseltown they're holding their breaths because the movie involves the Iraq War -- a subject that has become box-office poison.

"Iraq War films do extremely poorly at the box office. There's just no other way to put it," said Daniel Fierman, senior editor at GQ magazine. "There is zero indication that the audience has a substantial interest in these films -- even though they may be critically well received."

But an apparent lack of viewer interest hasn't stopped studios from "greenlighting" movies about the war produced by some big names and starring some pretty heavy hitters. There was Brian de Palma's "Redacted." Reese Witherspoon starred in "Rendition." And no less than three Oscar winners were involved with "In the Valley of Elah," Tommy Lee Jones, Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep.

And then, of course, there's "Home of the Brave," starring 50 Cent. And that doesn't even include the documentaries.

"There are tons of documentaries coming out," said Christopher Null, editor in chief of Filmcritic.com. "I mean, what is the difference between "Operation Homecoming" and some other film.

"I literally get them confused in my mind that I have to ask my critics if we've reviewed them," he joked.

Hollywood has a long history of using war as a muse. Patricia Hanson, executive editor of the American Film Institute's catalog of feature films, explains that there were "hundreds of films" about World War I that did very well.

"People were extremely interested, and it helped shape patriotism and brought the war home to people, especially in the small towns," Hanson said. During World War II, Hanson said, there was virtually "no film made that had a contemporary setting that didn't in some way relate to the war. There were even movies about patriotic gangsters who decided they would support the war effort."

It wasn't until Vietnam that filmmakers got a little skittish about making war films during wartime. "There were essentially no films about the war aside from John Wayne's "The Green Berets" in 1968, and that was very pro-Vietnam," Hanson said. "You start to see some things in the early '70s, but you really didn't get those films that dealt with the combat aspects of the war until the late '70s, after the war was over."