Posted on 03/29/2011 6:02:42 AM PDT by shortstop
'Fair game' a box-office flop
The movie Fair Game, about the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson affair, was in theaters and then it seemed to disappear. Any reason?
Poor ticket sales, basically.
Fair Game was a generally well-regarded movie (it got a good 79 percent favorable rating on the movie website Rotten Tomatoes) that starred big-name actors in Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. It was about CIA operative Valerie Plame (played by Watts) whose cover was blown in Bob Novak's widely read Washington Post political column.
The information was allegedly leaked to Novak by White House officials to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson (played by Penn), who had written a column in the New York Times in 2003 that said the Bush administration distorted intelligence information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
The movie, based on books by both Plame and Wilson, opened Nov. 5 in 46 theaters. It drew a paltry $651,082 in the opening weekend. As a comparison, Watts' 2005 movie King Kong drew more than $50 million in its first weekend.
Fair Game's total domestic gross ticket sales were just $9,540,691, and it closed on Feb. 17 after being in theaters 15 weeks. Its foreign ticket sales totaled $13,004,731, and the combined total barely covered the movie's $22 million production budget.
Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson played a very public game of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”. Plame’s cover was blown over a decade ago by Aldridge Ames.
For a propoganda film to break-even, that’s actually pretty good. Probably better than its producers even expected.
Yep. It would have been better if the producers would have lost their shirts! Must have had a lot of loons and family members in attendance.
I think most people believe that a good movie needs to be based on truth. Word of mouth will sell a movie too. Maybe the Wilsons will go away now with the Real Housewives of DC.
It’s impossible for me to take seriously any movie review that was a political flick made by lib/leftists and reviewed by lib/leftists. In fact, it’s difficult for me to take any non-political movie seriously because the liberal critics cannot leave their biases behind. In the case of Plame and Wilson, you know the critics were awarding it four stars before the first script was written. And, naturally, any movie with Sean Penn in it automatically will not come close to telling the truth.
The movie left out a few things.
Like the fact that Joe Wilson went to Niger on a ‘spy mission’ not just ONCE, but TWICE.
Both times he brought back the same story. That Niger wasn’t selling Yellowcake Ore directly to Iraq.
Which was true. Niger was selling it to (think carefully about this) LIBYA, and Libya was selling it to Iraq.
And WHO was the broker of the DEAL ?
Joe Wilson. That is why he was going to Niger in the first place. His wife ‘requesting’ that he be used to spy was just ‘cover’ for protecting Joe Wilson, his reputation, and the corrupt officials who used Joe to keep the SALES hidden while they profited from it.
Joe who? Valerie who?
Thanks for posting that.
“For a propoganda film to break-even, that’s actually pretty good. Probably better than its producers even expected. “
You mean Soros and the DNC?
The thing is people overestimate the public outrage over the Plame-Wilson fiasco. I’ll bet that give a name recognition test, even at the time, most adult Americans would not know Plame or Wilson. It was a tempest in a teapot. Nobody cared. Or few cared beyond some outraged, dishonest liberals who were trying to frame the Bush admin.
You know I keep reading, from leftist rags of course, that she was some super squirrel secret agent. I have only read one or two sources that are suspect saying she was just an analyst. You have any good sources on this?
In that movie, the heroic Joe Wilson is played by the equally heroic Sean Penn.
I hear Penn is now doing Scarlett Johansen. Any likely bets as to when he’ll start beating her too?
Mark
Conservative geeks should rework a bootleg copy of this and release it on the net with hilarious dubbed in replacement dialog. Kind of like an hour and a half version of that popular Hitler youtube thing.
You would have thought that the financial backers of this movie would have learned something from “Primary Colors”. Everyone knes what the real story was, so there was no reason to watch the movie.
Plame’s cover was blown years earlier in Who’s Who.
One wonders how they could turn a non-story of a woman sitting at a desk into a cloak and dagger action adventure.
Valerie Plame wasn’t an “operative” she was a desk jockey in the bureacracy and her husband was a partisan hack.
Their 15 minutes of fame were 14 minutes too many.
How true.
She was supposed to find out if Niger was selling ore to Saddam, and her husband was selling ore to Saddam.
Plame’s cover was blown over a decade ago by Aldridge Ames.
Valerie's new 'cover' was going public.
She was an asset in that her husband could be used to hide the sales of ore to Saddam (and others) be recruiting him to report on the sales of ore.
Now, Joe Wilson and others had to hide their money (in a safe form like gold) somewhere. Where would you hide it? In Ghaddafi's bank? Libya was the central exchange point.
What was the first thing Ghaddafi's wife tried to fly out of the country?
WHAT was Joe going to NIGER for, when he did these SPY missions ?
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