Posted on 04/26/2011 12:48:34 PM PDT by Beaten Valve
My esteemed colleague Kyle Smith may not qualify as a box-office Nostradamus ("I smell a hit,'' he once wrote of "An American Carol'') but he was certainly on the mark in predicting that "Atlas Shrugged -- Part One'' would flop in his Sunday column a couple of weeks ago.
After a middling performance during its opening weekend that was hyped in some quarters (i.e., The Hollywood Reporter), the per-screen average for this amateurish Ayn Rand adaptation (even Kyle could only muster 2.5 stars' worth of enthusiam for the movie, though he liked its message) plunged to an alarming $1,890 from $5,640 during its opening frame. Overall, the weekend's take was a scant $879,000 -- a whopping 48 percent drop despite adding 166 locations. Which certainly suggest they're running out of audience quick.
That means that at some locations, distributor Rocky Mountain Pictures will be writing checks to theaters to cover the difference between receipts and operating expenses. The only way they're likely to get the 1,000 screens the producers say they want next weekend is to rent them. And, as Kyle put it at his personal blog, "Whether the sequels get made is purely a matter of how much desire the producers have for losing money.''
Surely rubbing salt in the producers' wounds is the performance of Robert Redford's left-leaning "The Conspirator,'' which also added screens in its second weekend and managed a decent hold and a $2,696 per location average. Its current cumulative gross is $6.9 million vs. a hair over $3 million for "Atlas Shrugged.''
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Interesting, watching FOX this morning they had nothing but praise for how well it did in the few screens it was playing on.
In fairness this isn’t taking place in a vacuum. Even The Conspirator had a $10 million ad budget. AS had a $0 ad budget.
Atlas Tanked
Rand’s world is different from Marx’s, but it’s just as empty and merciless.
I checked the box office numbers, and the per screen gross was in the middle of the pack.
I went to see it in Grapevine, TX last Weds nite. There were about a dozen folks in our theatre, but there weren't more than 2 dozen cars in the entire parking lot, and it's a 17 theatre cinema.
Word of mouth takes time, especially for those who have no idea of what Atlas Shrugged is. It was mentioned again on Fox & Friends this morning.
I'm going to see it again this weekend. My wife and 9 YO son both want to see it again (3rd time for my son & me), and a sister-in-law is going to join us.
I'll admit my bias, but patience is important here.
No, that's 85% of Rotten Tomatoes users who claimed to have seen it, then bothered to weigh in on the website with their opinion.
The $5,640 per theater was for the first week. (It's in the Times article as well). Receipts fell sharply the second week, according to the Times.
It was in 6 theaters in its first week and in 2000 by its 25th week.
And MBFGW did not have the benefit of being based on an already-famous book.
What does the Post have to do with this? The article is about the Times. Different paper. We have several here, you know
What does the Post have to do with this? The article is about the Times. Different paper. We have several here, you know
It would take a purist like Phillip Glass (who IIRC once rendered the entire bloomin’ Bhagavad Gita into an off-Broadway production — every single word of that turgid Hindu tome, in the original Sanskrit no less) to literally transcribe Ayn Rand’s book to the screen. And the result would play for maybe 6-8 hours. Who’d want to see that at all, unless it was as episodes in a series? Mercifully, this movie skips the monologues.
My wife and I went to see it last weekend and the theater was full. I’d recommend it to everyone, but I’m sure you won’t see many libs there.
Everyone should see it just to support the movement.
I saw it and it was fine. Parts were chillingly on-point relative to the demogoguery coming from The Empty Suit.
This has nothing to do with The Post, the numbers are the numbers and there’s plenty of places to look them up and the numbers say that Atlas shrugged all over itself, and The Conspirator really isn’t doing well either.
You really do need God to prevent loss of mercy (or misdirected mercy) in any human system. But the movie is less adamantly atheist than the book or even more so, the philosopher.
I wonder if this is an effort to do a “hit” on the move to kill it off.
No it didn’t, most movies last weekend had very little audiences. I enjoyed it as well as the book.
Most of us have a hard time trying to find a decent movie to see.
Part of the problem is that as new theaters are added, their main web site
is not organized enough to add it to their on line list immediately.
I can't think of a movie I want to see where the nearest venue is 45 miles away...
A little competent promotion on their web site cetainly wouldn't hurt.
Sort of like the atheistic materialism being expressed by main stream hollywood. Oh no that’s right one can only enjoy hollyweird.
Oh, excuse me, sorry for the inaccuracy.
I humbly thank you for showing me the error of my ways. I will now go scourge myself so I err no more.
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