Perhaps not since “Gigli” has a movie so highly anticipated by the media done so little at the box office.
Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” has been and still is being strongly promoted in the media, but as with the ill-fated Lopez-Affleck outing, the moviegoers aren’t busting down theater doors to see it.
Despite lengthy interviews on “The Early Show” and “Today” or a coveted interview slot on late night talk shows like “The Tonight Show,” Gore’s apocalyptic view of global warming is not burning up the box office. It’s a sleeper that refuses to be roused, but the media keep on trying. Gore is slated to be interviewed by Larry King tonight on CNN. That’s the latest media push to promote climate change, a trend going back 110 years according to a Special Report called “Fire and Ice [1].”
Gore’s film recently hit its widest release on the June 9-11 weekend and is showing in 122 theaters nationwide. So far, despite a strong per-theater earning average, it’s not yet made $4 million in its three weeks on the silver screen. The aforementioned “Gigli [2]” only lasted in theaters for three weeks, but grossed more than Gore’s movie has to date, making $6 million.
Inconveniently enough, Gore’s tour de force isn’t just losing out to blockbusters like “X-Men 3” and “Cars,” which are raking in money at thousands of theaters nationwide. He’s not even doing well with the NPR set either.
The dry-witted and un-hyped Robert Altman-Garrison Keillor film “A Prairie Home Companion [3],” made more than $4.5 million in its opening weekend of June 9-11. The film is a theatrical spin-off of Keillor’s public radio program [4], and Keillor’s columns [5] leave no mistake about his leftward political leanings.
The Business & Media Institute has reported on the media’s push to market Gore’s new image, from Time hyping his Current TV [6] in August 2005 to the media’s push this May [7] and June [8] to promote his documentary.
