It was just a terrible weekend to be a conservative: The Atlas Shrugged movie pulled in a meager $468,573 at the box office. This means the film has made $3,947,827 in its three weeks in wide release. Again, it cost an estimated 20 million dollars to make and market. Quick, somebody figure out how many DVDs they’d have to sell in order to turn a profit!
The Wall Street Journal interviewed the film’s producer, John Aglialoro about his hopes that Hollywood will now want to partner in making the second part of a projected trilogy whose first film is a remarkable failure:
As for making second and third installments of “Atlas Shrugged,” Aglialoro said he wouldn’t proceed until he had a more extensive marketing plan in place.
Ideally, he would also like to partner with Hollywood for the next go-around. “It’s my hope that some of the major studios will believe that this is not just a movie and it’s over. I’m open to making a deal with a major studio. I don’t want to fight them. I want to join them,” he said.
He said he’d be open to doing another $10 million independent production. “But wouldn’t it be nice to do a $50 million movie? And now the studios have a laboratory in part 1.”
This is the same guy who said he was considering going on strike and not make any more Atlas Shrugged movies because the critics hurt his feelings. Good lord, this is so much fun to watch. I mean, I knew the movie would flop, but who knew the action of flopping would take so long or be so enjoyable?
One might almost draw the conclusion that certain adherents to Rand’s philosophy are incapable of reconciling the difference between their own perception of the value of their contributions and the public’s perception of that value.
He’s looking for a handout from the studio. It’s so great to see libertarian principles abandoned in the face of reality.
Didn’t I see Quark in one of the previews? Or Principle Skinner take your pick.
Am I The only one shocked that this “film” cost TWENTY MILLION ACTUAL DOLLARS to make/market? I can’t believe it would have pulled in dime one, but what the fuck could they have spent that much money on? Not the trailer, ads (were there ads?), cast, or actual movie…
Seriously, was this just some kind of giant money laundering/write-off scheme like The Producers?
@4 Atlas Shrugged The Musical – Now with Gay Dancing Nazis .. would probably actually sell. It’s a shame they didn’t make that instead. It’d have been a fantastic campy comedy.
Call rewrite:
Government officials are now friendly helpers who double as ballroom dance tutors.
The super fast freight train is redesigned to require a 400 person union to staff and maintain it.
Oh, if I only had money: I would be a total Gayle Wyland/Elsworth Toohey nightmare to this poor guy. I’d tell him I’d bankroll both parts 2 & 3, and pay him personally twenty million a pop, but that one had to be a rock opera, and the other done entirely in haiku. And I’d require that the cast of “The Jersey Shore” star in both of them.
Oh, thank you for the inspiration, Dear Leader!
Additionally, at the end of the trilogy, there would be some sort of epic competition between the Taggard Transcontinental and Amtrak. Amtrak would win. A big musical production number, praising labor and government programs and starring a cast of thousands, would wrap it all up.
@4 Makes me wonder too.
I have some aspiring film maker friends who’ve produced works and have had them screened. Hell, Blair Witch Project was made for less than 1 million. The movie The American Astronaut got around using special effects and is still a solidly entertaining movie.
How lucrative do they think the indie film market is?
Then I’d offer him eighty million to do a romantic comedy adaptation of “The Fountainhead” where Howard Roark (Justin Bieber) finds fufillment working for HUD and married to Catherine Hallsey (Miley Cyrus), and Dominic Francon (Jennifer Lopez) decides that what she really wants out of life is to be a good wife to Peter Keating (Ashton Kutcher), and mother to his children.
With Harvey Fierstein as Ellsworth Toohey and Bill Cosby as Gail Wynand!
@2 for the insightful Libertarians Are Sellouts Pretending To Be Principled win.
Daaamn… Catalina’s on a roll.
Catalina if I had the money I’d go halfsies with you!
@14: No. Not bashing art. Bashing “art.”
Zombie Ayn Rand condems the mediocrity of this effort and the uncouth plebian masses who resist her message. Indeed her hunger for BRAINS makes one wonder if she was not already a zombie when she wrote it.
Umm. You DO realize that conservatives don’t have half the fascination with Rand you do, don’t you Mr. Constantly boring?
This absorption with Rands odd books on the part of the left would be like every conservative obsessing over the writings of that hero of the left, Karl Marx.
#8
Yes, and tickets (at a high density downtown “urbist” location like Radio City Music Hall) would be priced according to ability to pay.
Wow! This movie is such an embarrassment, Seatleblues is trying to pretend conservatives never really cared much about Rand. That is hilarious.
You’re only as good as your last movie in Hollywood. He shouldn’t get his hopes up.
how does one manage to spend that kind of cash and not have one single recognizable hollywood actor’s name in the credits? and who could not predict that, without a moderately famous actor in it, the public at large would not bother with it? massive denial was involved in the making of this flim.
Critics who start out by saying, “Oh, if I only had money…” are basically saying that they’d like someone who earned money to give it to them so they can throw it away on unproductive fantasies. What losers.
massive denial was involved in the making of this flim.
(I love “flim.”)
Massive denial, yes, because it’s a cult. If you received the promo emails leading up to its release, you’d have seen the trademark combination of smug preening and self-pitying victimization that’s characterized the whole project. “Only we have the courage and the rationality to tell the truth, so of course the world hates us.” Both halves–the sacred Truth; the persecution by the mob–are essential to the cult’s believers.
Anyone curious to see how Dragnie, Hunk Rawbone, John Glatt, and the rest of the gang turned out ten years later (in “the secret sequel”) should go here:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/547…
@22: You mean the way the producer of Atlas Shrugged is asking Hollywood (people who have earned money) to back his next film? A movie that cost 20 Mil to make and has made less than 4 Mil? Which pretty much qualifies it as his “unproductive fantasy” wouldn’t you say? That kind of loser? Did you even read the post?
I think you need to change your screen name there baby.
@17: Conservatives don’t really like Ayn Rand. You are actually trying to pitch that. My god man, sometimes I think the only way could embarrass yourself more is if you peed your pants in the middle of the grocery store.
Oh, now don’t be bitter, @22. I’m sure your little film was very nice, and that it’s just the liberal media that’s holding it back. That doesn’t stop you from having movie nights with your friends and watching it ad nauseum, kind of like those people who know every line of “Titanic”.
As I have said, many, many, many times, I actually liked “The Fountainhead”, once I learned to just leaf through the numerous fifty page lectures by Howard Roark. Ayn would have made a great romance novelist if she had only had a good editor. That would have allowed her to live out her days in Galt-like splendor, with servants to take out the trash.
As it was, she ended up living in squalor, and off the government. What a waste.
@25
I’m a conservative. Not one conservative I know thinks much of Rand. Not one has been to see this film. She’s a carricature, and a bad novelist to boot. Her theories have as much to do with how conservatives view economics as an anarchist does with how leftists view the world. I read Atlas Shrugged, or part of it, as a college freshman and still couldn’t stomach the notions it espoused.
Oddly, and for once, Catalina Vel-DuRay-Simpson-Smith-Johnson has it right. Rand should have been a romance novelist and left political or economic theory to others.
Rand is just a convenient straw man for lazy liberals to attack their misperceptions of conservative thought.
@27: Now tell us all about the Austrian School.
@27: Perhaps then, you don’t consider Alan Greenspan, for example, a conservative. Or an economist. Cuz he sure liked her.
I have always said that Ayn Rand, being unable to find porn that suited her tastes, decided to write it herself. The rest of us have had to suffer for her pent up perviness ever since.
First, if Rand was not a good novelist then how did she sell 8 million? Secondly, I saw the movie and I didn’t think it was that bad. Thirdly, however, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t do that well. Moviegoers don’t want to think. They want titilation and special effects. Things like Iron Man, Scream 4, or SAW XXXX. The average moviegoer is a kid trying to get his girlfriend in the mood.