Glen Powell has an explanation for why The Running Man flopped, and it's the oldest one in the Hollywood playbook: the marketing people messed up. The star says Paramount's marketing shake-up mid-campaign sank the movie, and you can read the whole thing over at Yahoo, where the reaction has been about what you'd expect.

I like Glen Powell. I've said so. He's got the kind of grin that used to get a man a seven-picture deal at MGM, and he works, which puts him ahead of half his generation. But when a movie tanks and the leading man starts pointing at the ad budget, I hear my mother's voice: excuses are like previews, everybody's got one and most of them lie.

The Running Man, for those of us who saw the 1987 version in an actual theater with actual popcorn, was Arnold Schwarzenegger in spandex, Richard Dawson doing the best performance of his career by simply playing himself, and a heap of glorious nonsense about game shows and dystopia. It was silly and it knew it was silly, which is the secret the remake class keeps forgetting. Stephen King wrote the novel under his Bachman name, lean and mean, and Hollywood has spent forty years trying to dress it up in importance.

Powell's claim is that Paramount reorganized its marketing department while the film was in release, and the movie got lost in the shuffle. Maybe that happened. Studios are badly run; that's not news, that's Tuesday. But movies with legs survive a shuffled ad campaign. Movies people want to see find their audience through word of mouth, always have, since before the Rex Theater in Muskogee charged a dollar fifty and still sold out the matinee. What the marketing excuse can't cover is a theater full of people who saw the trailer, shrugged, and stayed home.

The internet gave him the treatment, and I can't say the crowd was wrong. The general thrust: a star who spent a year telling us this was his dream project now says the studio fumbled it, and somehow the dream project itself is above examination. The numbers don't care about office politics. They never do.

Here's what I'd tell Mr. Powell if he sat in my parlor. The audience forgives a flop. We forgave Ishtar, we forgave Heaven's Gate, we forgave Waterworld, which made its money back eventually and didn't deserve a decade of abuse. What we don't forgive is being handed a bureaucratic shrug when we ask what went wrong. Paul Newman bombed plenty and he never once blamed the ad buys. He'd say, we made a picture and not enough of you came, and we'll make a better one. That's the answer, and it costs nothing and buys everything.

Every remake now arrives with an alibi stitched into the lining. If it fails, it's the algorithm, the strike schedule, the marketing department, the audience that just wasn't ready. It is never the picture. It is never the two hours of lecture with a chase scene stapled on. The trailer told us what The Running Man was, and a good chunk of this country decided we'd already seen it, back when it had Arnold and a laugh track and no pretensions.

Take the hit, Glen. Make the next one better. And if it flops too, stand up straight and say the movie didn't work. The '87 cast would have, and one of them was a game show host.