DaveScot Serves Up Some Bush Strategery

The “Bush Strategery” can be roughly stated as continuously redefining failure as success in order to achieve the latter (See: Iraq War). Now let’s have a look at what DaveScot has to say in response to the opening weekend of Expelled:

According to Box Office Prophets the projected total weekend box office sales for Expelled is $3.7 million.

According to Box Office Mojo on Friday alone ticket sales were $1.2 million.

Just for fun compare to what Flock of Dodos did on opening weekend.

Well, I don’t want to shit on Randy Olson’s efforts or anything, but he didn’t have anywhere near the resources or exposer that Expelled enjoyed prior to release. Opening in over 1000 venues and (obviously) having a substantial advertising budget makes it more appropriate to compare this to other high profile documentaries. There are immediately obvious examples that come to mind:

The only other newcomer in the Top 10 was conservative commentator Ben Stein’s documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed which makes the intelligent design argument. Playing in 1,052 theaters, the pic distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures fell over the weekend from 8th to 10th place after earning $1.2M Friday and $989K Saturday for a $2.9M weekend. But the per screen average for Friday was a feeble $1,145 and for Saturday $940 (and $2,830 for the entire weekend), showing there wasn’t much pent-up demand for the film despite an aggressive publicity campaign on right-wing media. So much for the conservative argument that people would flock to films not representing the “agenda of liberal Hollywood”. (Just for comparison purposes: Michael Moore’s most recent Sicko did $4.4 mil its opening weekend from only 441 theaters, and his Fahrenheit 9/11 did $23.9M its opening weekend from 868 venues.)

The flick is a bomb and will soon be forgotten, but as I predicted elsewhere the spin is already beginning.

UPDATE: Some curious (read: dishonest) sourcing and claims by DaveScot:

Expelled #2 Highest Grossing Political Documentary

Of course, if you actually follow his link you’ll find that the opening box-office for Sicko wildly conflicts with other sources. If you look closely, it only shows the gross for a single theater. And furthermore, all the other documentaries above Expelled, save Fahrenheit 9/11, show the number of opening theaters in the single digits. Sorry guys, the gross per theater for Expelled was pathetic. And because of this, theaters are going to start dropping the film. The movie was a bomb.

UPDATE II: Okay, I’ve been hard on DaveScot here, but I also have to be fair. His uncharacteristic reasonableness displayed here must be read to be believed. (EDIT: Also see here.)