Ah, day one of the blogs being live, and we have our first indieWIRE blog cat-fight between Anthony and Eugene ... and, of course, on the "what is indie?" question as it relates to "The Passion of the Christ". The debate over that film's inclusion in our box office continues on as our definition of what indie is comes into contrast with the scope and muscle of that film.

The "what is indie" debates are real and frequent among the people in indieWIRE, and the spill over of those debates into these blogs is going to be a recurring theme forever, and nothing like inclusion in the box office brings that debate out. After all, that's not even all the films out there -- just the ones being tracked during their theatrical run. But the decisions certainly aren't arbitrary, and they aren't always unanimous even when a consensus arises.

My personal belief is that all charts are inherantly political, but ours is at least weighted towards being porous enough for real self-distributed efforts to break into the top of the heap (because "per screen average" is the key metric we track.) "The Passion of the Christ" throws us for a loop because service deals are creating new kinds of distributor-for-hire relationships.

That said, it's T-minus 4 weeks until the ridiculous spike in the box office graph finally disappears ... and I know somewhere my high school algebra teacher was chuckling at me every Tuesday for not being able to figure out how to manually build a logarithmic version of the chart by hand in Photoshop.