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This sounds incredibly conspiratorial, but it has a fairly long history. If the studio released this movie in a theatre in some red state, they would also tell a variety of people that it was coming there with the exacting expectation that they would travel to that place to see the movie em masse when it opened. It only takes about 300 gay people from Dallas to go to Plano to make this opening 'a hit' as far as Plano goes.

Its not unfamiliar for a studio, a producer or even a star to 'stock' an opening by paying for people to attend an opening weekend. And if their movie really sucks, they can claim that people bought tickets to other movies but really went into their movie but were trying to dampen the numbers by buying the wrong tickets (hello, Spike Lee).