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 ...
I'll buy the DVD when it comes out.
I liked it. Not great acting but gets the point across very well. Waiting for the 2nd part!
The success of this movie probably won’t depend on public viewings, but what was negotiated on the back-end for cable, Netflix, DVD, international distribution, etc.
I rarely go to movies any more.
I wait for it to get on the net or cable.
DVD sales is where the money will be made. If they did the job it’s reported they did, this film will be shared with a lot of folks in DVD.
I liked the movie too.
Marsden in his opening scene as James Taggart was obviously saying his lines without really believing it.
Marsden surprised me, though. He got a lot better as the movie progressed.
I guess atheist materialism doesn’t sell as well as the producers hoped.
Sure, it's under different ownership now, but this rag and its executives (Villard and company) were largely responsible for the creation of the overly racist scam known as the NAACP. During the Schiff years, the Post was a decidely leftist organ. A long and sordid heritage of opposition to Conservative Capitalism isn't ready dropped no matter whose name is curently on the masthead. Murdoch should have killed the paper, purged everyone and relaunched it under a different name.
agreeed. and in tough economic times in Obamas America, it is more cost efficient to purchase/rent the movie and have a viewing party and ensuing discussions.
You know movies scenes are not usually shot in sequence, right? Then again, with this movie...
That’s because MOST workers are busy WORKING....and going Galt.....
We might not get part 2 if part 1 doesn’t do well. :-(
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER-—
Despite its “awful” marketing plan, as one distribution exec calls it, the movie earned a $5,640 per-theater average opening: “Things have turned for us,” producer Harmon Kaslow tells THR.
This and the NYT article doesn’t square, or am I missing something?
If the movie is like the bombastic novel, then no wonder!
Thanks for reminding me, I’d forgotten about that.
It could very well be they had to go with the scene the way it was, due to budget constraints.
Copyright restrictions apply downthread every bit as much as in the main article box, thanks.
Check out Rotten Tomatoes:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/atlas_shrugged_part_i/
Rotten Tomatoes has a 6%/85% split.
6% of critics like the movie, 85% of theater audiences like the movie.
Uh.....white folks don’t go to the movies much anymore. Tired of getting jumped.
I was concerned about this, but the flick does not seem to say much about God at all, so it’s really an agnostic materialism. There are philosophies better than this, but there are also philosophies much worse.
That is an interesting question. If you went Galt, would you want to go for a picture about going Galt?
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.
Read it again, you must have missed something.
Not good news.
With such a small budget we will get part two.
In the last 20 years I have been to the theater exactly 4 times. I saw all three of The Lord of the Rings movies and Master and Commander. I would see this movie if it were playing nearby. I won’t shell out the money for the nearly 200 mile roundtrip required.
What is amazing is that the Pueblo Chieftain Newspaper just ran an article on how several scenes were filmed in Pueblo, CO. The steel mill and the Union station were featured. But the film is not playing in Pueblo. That fact wasn’t mentioned in the article.
Pueblo has a population of 105,000 and another 50,000 in the county. That seems large enough to put the movie on at least one screen. Given the garbage they will put on I can’t see where they could lose.
My only gripe, and it's a very small gripe, is that they didn't give Francisco 3-5 minutes to fully flesh out his actions at San Sebastian Mines.
IMO, to fully comprehend what's going on, reading the novel beforehand is a necessity. That's why my wife wants to see it again. She's never read the book, and could not understand my excitement prior to attending the movie.
Will she read it? That's to be determined.
You'd be surprised at the people who didn't know when John Galt appeared on the screen. I thought that was beautifully done. He's there on page one (to 699), but is not actually introduced until page 700. How does a screenwriter deal with that?
Again, I'll admit my bias, but this is a really deep movie. If it hangs around long enough, there will be plenty of people returning for a second or third visit.
Watch out for the DVD sales!
The spin by the Post with charged words such as "collapses", "plunged", "flop", "amateurish", "scant" and many more are not objective. In contrast, "The Conspirator" is depicted by the Post as a "decent hold" at $2,696.
In my estimation, the Post appears to be taking glee in the per-location BO dropoff without even mentioning the other factors such as the effect of the Easter weekend. A purely factual treatment without the breathless adjectives would have been preferrred (although I realize that straightforwardness is not their forte).
I’m skeptical, because the producers of Atlas Shrugged said they’re releasing the moving to more theaters,that demand had outstripped availability.
“The Hollywood Reporter has reported that the film will expand its release from 299 theaters to 425 this weekend and to 1,000 by the end of the month.”
The article was posted April 21.
Good advice! I just read it for the second time, and I was amazed at all that I missed the first time through.
I've received mail from FReepers that have read the book upwards of ten times, and they're still finding things they missed.
The portion of the novel given in the movie doesn't directly touch on it - you're absolutely right. But the entire thesis of Atlas Shrugged is an indirect attack on the message of the Cross.
The famous speech by John Galt near the end of the book - over 25,000 words and probably over three hours long if it were actually recited - is effectively an extended assault on the notion of the righteous sacrificing themselves for the good of sinners.
While the sequel will likely never be financed and while the producers would probably never inflict the full text of that wooden speech on an audience, they would not be true to the novel if they did not drive that point home - since that is the core thesis of the book and of Ayn Rand's whole notion of "the virtue of selfishness."
That’s not spin, that’s fact. They increased the number of theaters by 50% and the weekend GROSS revenue DROPPED by almost 50%. That is a collapse, a plunge and possibly a flop depending on what happens in the next few weeks.
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