Here we are two whole days after the "Atlas Shrugged: Part I" movie release. You know, that movie that was going to rescue America from the socialist hoodlums now in the White House by spreading the Good News Gospel of Greed?
What happens when you try to market a movie to the Tea Party? How's the revolution going?
Uh oh. Not very well. A look at the numbers over the jump.
I've been looking at the numbers from here.
The reviews, you've already heard, were cataclysmic. A low-budget movie with no names made by people with no experience. Somehow Rotten Tomatoes was able to scare up two positive reviews out of twenty-one, for a Fresh score of 10%. The trailer is a classic; I really like the guy who yells "MAYBE YOU SHOULD LET ME FINISH SPEAKING!!!!"
The movie opened on 300 screens, many of them in very strange locations in the middle of nowhere. But the Loyal Randians promised that they'd drive 200 miles if necessary to be there on opening day. Opening day take: $675,000. If you figure 8 dollars a ticket, that's about 85,000 tickets sold. Not terrible, but not enough to bump it into the top ten.
But then things started getting worse. The next day, they sold almost the same number of tickets, with a take of $639,000. Why is that a problem? Because movies usually do much better on Saturdays than Fridays. Of the top ten movies, the average gain of Saturday over Friday was 50%. The only movie in the top ten that actually lost ground was "Scream 4," which is generally considered a swing and a miss, and lost about 20%. "Atlas Shrugged" should have, if it followed the industry pattern, gained 50%. Instead it lost 6%.
In other words, the spiral has already started. They had their Tea Party on the 15th, it lasted one day, and it's all downhill from here.
If it moves, as expected, with the rest of the field today -- down 40% Sunday over Saturday -- that means the film will fail to reach $2M on its opening weekend. Since most movies make somewhere between half and a third of their total box office in the first weekend, this suggests the movie will max out at $6M -- slightly over half their production budget, not counting distribution costs and publicity.
In short: the movie flopped and the guy who financed it (and produced it, and gave himself a screenwriter's credit as well) just lost millions. And the only way there'll be a sequel is if he decides he likes losing millions.
In shorter: ha ha ha ha ha, Ayn Rand, you suck. The invisible hand of the marketplace just slapped you hard upside the head.