It’s always gratifying to watch a truly awful movie flopping horribly at the box office but several extra-cinematic factors make the disastrous reception for “Death of a President” even more enjoyable than usual.
The British import drew intense attention (and widespread condemnation) for mixing news footage and staged interviews to portray the assassination of George W. Bush, and the subsequent power grab by President Cheney, in October, 2007. After a tumultuous but mostly positive response at the Toronto Film Festival, glowing reviews from the Roger Ebert website and other mainstream critical voices, and intense controversy (including a combative appearance by director Gabriel Range on the Michael Medved Show) that provided priceless publicity, the film opened on Friday not with a bang, but with a whimper. The much ballyhooed pseudo-documentary entered a grand total of $167,000 on 91 screens across the country, for 27th place on the weekly box-office list and an anemic per screen average of just $1,835 – a shockingly low figure for a “prestige” project available mostly at selective art house venues. By contrast, the top film in the country last weekend, “Saw III,” averaged a robust $10,830 for its 3,167 screens. Even the low-budget, critically dismissed Christian football movie, “Facing the Giants,” drew a $2,010 average on its 393 screens and has already earned $6.3 million dollars in five weeks—many times to the total possible take for “Death of a President.” In terms of theatrical distribution in the U.S., the assassination fantasy remains unlikely to crack $1 million in box office receipts, and may fail to recoup even its own modest production budget.
The failure of the film carries two important lessons for entertainment executives as well as political pundits.
First, it’s time to retire or terminate the inane, shopworn theory that suggests that controversy guarantees publicity, and publicity guarantees box office success. “The Last Temptation of Christ,” perhaps the most controversial film in movie history, should have discredited this logic 18 years ago. Despite a blaze of top-of-the-news global conflict over the film, and unprecedented attention from magazines, TV news broadcasts, newspapers, preachers, and demonstrations that drew tens of thousands of participants, the movie fizzled at the multiplex, failing to earn back even its modest production budget of $6 million. “Death of a President” similarly provoked intense praise and widespread denunciation (even Hillary Clinton condemned it without seeing it) but failed abjectly in getting people to invest their money to see the actual film. Newmarket, the American distribution company for “Death of a President” (or DOAP), had scored spectacular success with another bitterly debated release, “The Passion of the Christ,” so they liked the idea of commentators going back and forth with complaint and commendation concerning their new, relentlessly mediocre movie. The executives probably assumed that just as it was easy to sell Jesus to a public already predisposed to love the Man from Nazareth, so to it would be easy to sell the Bush assassination to a populace already full of hatred to the man from Crawford, Texas.
That’s the other big lesson from the DOAP fiasco: don’t over-estimate the power of Bush hatred. Critics might feel intrigued by the slick manipulation of imagery to make the shooting of the chief executive look authentic, but for ordinary Americans the world looks threatening and unstable enough without worry about the assassination of our leaders. That’s especially true for a tendentious, ultimately silly piece of work like DOAP: which suggests that the chief executive had it coming, and takes a sympathetic attitude toward the fictional shooter. He’s a grieving father (and a former Army major himself) who blames Bush for the death of his stalwart son in Iraq, and for “destroying” and “ruining” honor, decency and accountability in the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.
Bush-hatred may be a powerful force in the lives of many Americans, but it’s hard to base an entire movie on that singular, simplistic loathing – just as you can’t base an entire election campaign on distaste for George W. Bush when his name isn’t even on the ballot. The movie business learned this weekend about the limited usefulness of anti-administration rage as a tool for promoting a project. On next Tuesday, the political class may get a similar and related lesson about the waning utility of relentless Bush bashing as a simplistic and single-minded strategy for seizing control of the Senate and the House.