Restoring My Faith In The Free Market

In yesterday’s open thread, Cassandra provided a link showing the poor performance of the Atlas Shrugged adaptation. It’s worse than just being a dud, it’s a “parasite.”

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.”

That’s right – it’s so bad that the producers will have to pay money to movie theaters to show the movie. I’m not going to take any great meaning from the failure of the movie. A crappy adaptation of a crappy novel is not a good movie, that’s not a surprise.

I do think you could make an interesting movie about Ayn Rand. I think it would be fascinating to read a story about a woman who immigrated to America to become the intellectual leader of the modern Republican party despite being an atheist who practiced polyamory and who received government assistance despite railing against it.