Harvey Weinstein, whining over the poor box-office ($12 million) for the daring Easter-weekend opening of his double-feature event, Grindhouse, says he’s going to rerelease the two films in a few weeks as single features with added footage, which is how they’ll play in Europe, with Tarantino’s Death Proof screening at Cannes and Rodriquez’s Planet Terror coming out four or five months after. “Our research showed the length kept people away,” Weinstein told LA Weekly‘s Nikki Finke. “It was the single biggest deterrent. It was 3 hours and 12 minutes long. We originally intended to get it all in in 2 hours, 30 minutes. That would have been a better time. But the movies ran longer, the [fake] trailers ran longer, everything ran longer.” He also attributes empty seats to people’s not getting the grindhouse concept – and that’s despite Tarantino’s hawking maw on every talk show and such advertising as this poster. It might have helped had he allowed the behemoth film to be screened at real grindhouses and the Grindhouse Film Festival (yes, Virginia, there is a Grindhouse Film Festival).

It’s a shame the movie will be split into two features because, not being able to compare her two performances back-to-back, audiences won’t be able to see what a wonderful actress Rose McGowan has become. She’s in both movies, playing very different girls very convincingly – and what happens to her in Death Proof broke our heart.