Expelled box office receipts decline in first weekend
Edited on 4/23/08 to update revised box office receipt figures.
Depending on which side you believe, the opening of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed last Friday was either a stupendous success or a dismal failure. The actual answer probably lies somewhere in between.
Here are the actual gross box office receipts, from Box Office Mojo, for 1,052 theaters:
| Friday, 4/18 | $1,208,748 |
| Saturday, 4/19 | $996,244 |
| Sunday, 4/20 | $765,856 |
For a political documentary, Expelled did really well, placing in the top 10 each of its first three days. Its daily receipts, however, seem to be declining, as the initial hubbub about its release dies out.
Detractors of the movie point to the decline in receipts over three days (hardly a statistically valid sample) and predict Expelled will be an overall box office flop. Supporters of the movie on the other hand say its initial success places it among the top grossing documentaries in recent times.
Pre-release noise about Expelled was pretty substantial. The movie’s marketing firm screened the flick all over the country beginning in August ‘07, mostly to receptive audiences (conservative Christians, mostly). Those folks talked it up, saying it was the best thing since the Book of Revelations. Less sympathetic reviewers panned it, which is still marketing — the only bad publicity is no publicity.
Then there was the brouhaha a few weeks ago about the movie’s creators preventing blogger PZ Myers (who actually appears in the movie) from seeing a private screening of it at Mall of America. And the allegations that some animations in the pre-release version were cribbed from copyrighted material, and that John Lennon’s estate did not give permission to use 25 seconds of his song, “Imagine,” in the movie.
So right from the start, many moviegoers out of curiosity went to the opening to see what the fuss was about. The box office figures would indicate that, curiosity satisfied, audiences are instead spending their money elsewhere.
Professional critics have by and large panned the movie, leaving it with a tomatometer reading of 3 out of 10. As a work of cinema, the movie is heavy handed, plodding, polemical and hopelessly biased, critics say. As a scientific documentary, the movie is a piece of shit.
Meanwhile, those who already accept the premise of the flick, that an evolution-happy, atheistic hegemony is persecuting those who believe an Intelligent Designer (God) had a hand in our biology, call it an unbridled success. Compared to other documentaries, Expelled is not doing so badly. Its lifetime gross (for three days) of $2.97 million already puts it in the top 10 political documentaries released since 1982. Time will tell whether it manages to hold that place.
Among films appealing to Christian audiences, however, Expelled is nowhere near the top 10, at least judging from the figures at this website. [Right now, it has taken in slightly more than The Joshua Project, a 1993 SF B-movie that's so bad that most YouTube clips are Oscar-winners by comparison.] Box Office Mojo puts Expelled at #18 among Christian movies.
Has Expelled made its makers any money? Nowhere close. The creators, Premise Media, say they spent $3.5 million making Expelled, and they have spent an unknown amount marketing it. One blogger estimates the total cost of the movie + marketing is about $10 million, which seems reasonable. Since producers only get a small percentage of box office receipts, Expelled so far is a money pit. First-run theater operators are not making too much off of it either yet, so at some point (maybe soon) they may pull Expelled for some other movie that might actually be worth the rental cost.
And then Expelled will end up in the home video market, where it might make its producers some money — eventually.
