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Updated 4/30/08 to include weekend tallies.
From Box Office Mojo: Weekend receipts for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed doubled weekday per-day sales, but in general receipts are less than half what they were for the opening weekend. Looks like Expelled has lost its momentum.
Total gross receipts are now about $5,455,000, and the movie has fallen to 12th in gross receipts.
| Friday, 4/18 |
$1,208,748 |
| Saturday, 4/19 |
$996,244 |
| Sunday, 4/20 |
$765,856 |
| Monday. 4/21 |
$238,804 |
| Tuesday, 4/22 |
$227,232 |
| Wednesday, 4/23 |
$234,596 |
| Thursday, 4/24 |
$231,440 |
| Friday, 4/25 |
$452,000-estimated |
| Saturday, 4/26 |
$529,000-estimated |
| Sunday, 4/27 |
$414,000-estimated |
| Monday, 4/28 |
$157,191 |
| Tuesday, 4/29 |
$162,396 |
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Central Ohio is the latest hotspot for lunatic religious types imposing their beliefs on hapless students.
John Freshwater, an 8th grade science teacher in Mount Vernon, has allegedly used an electrostatic device to leave Christian crosses on students’ skin, passed out anti-evolution brochures, and taught his science classes about the meaning of Good Friday and Easter. When administrators told him he had to remove a Bible from his desktop, Freshwater refused, inspiring a student rally on his behalf and an opposing response from the American Civil Liberties Union.
Mount Vernon school officials have arranged for an independent investigation into the allegations against Freshwater, according to the local newspaper. He will continue to teach, but with an administrator present to monitor his behavior.
If the issue were just the presence of a single Bible on his desk, Freshwater would not be in such hot water. As it is, he has several Bibles in his classroom, which he loans out to students. Further, it is clear he uses his role as teacher to impose his religious beliefs on his students. Even if the majority of students share those beliefs, as a public school teacher (not to mention a science teacher) he is not free to introduce religion into the classroom. There’s this little thing called the US Constitution barring that kind of behavior.
Then there’s his using a demonstration device to burn a student deliberately, which is not only unprofessional, but should be grounds for dismissal in and of itself.
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Granted, Mondays are slow days for movie theaters, but Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed grossed only $238,804 at 1,052 theaters, a third of what it grossed on Sunday.
[Updated 4/23/08: Tuesday's sales were $227,232 for a total to date of $3,436,884, according to Box Office Mojo.]
After five days in the theaters, the anti-evolution movie has grossed $3.4 million, far from the amount its producers need to break even. Nevertheless, it’s still ranked eighth in gross receipts for all April 18 releases and eighth in receipts for “political documentaries.’
In other words, for the kind of movie it is, Expelled is doing about as well as most observers would expect.
Whether it will have “legs” past its first week remains in doubt. Its release followed weeks of carefully orchestrated “private screenings” to sympathetic audiences, a national TV ad campaign, and attention from critics of the movie and its premise — that “Darwinists” persecute anyone who suggests evolution is invalid and that an Intelligent Designer (or God) created life on Earth.
The movie’s marketers have encouraged churches, youth groups and Christian schools to organize field trips to see Expelled in the theaters, offering them prizes for the most tickets purchased. Those efforts will probably not be enough to shore up sales, though.
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Premise Media, the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, have filed suit in Texas asking for a “declaratory judgment that there is no copyright or other infringement” in the movie, opening tomorrow nationwide.
The suit responds to a communication from lawyers for XVIVO, creators of scientific animations, who allege that animations in the movie were remarkably like those in Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell.
Expelled‘s producers have apparently removed the offending animation from the final cut of the flick, but filed the civil suit anyway, demanding that XVIVO pay Premise Media’s attorney fees.
SA Smith, who blogs at ERV, has obtained a copy of the 16-page suit and picks it apart in detail. It’s a nuisance suit, to keep XVIVO tied up in court and to hamstring it financially.
Premise Media et alia in a press release also claims XVIVO’s legal challenge (note it was a letter, not a lawsuit) is yet another effort to suppress free speech.
Whatever. XVIVO has not demanded the film be pulled from the theaters, just that its intellectual property rights be respected. The XVIVO communication says nothing about the message or validity of the film.
One allegation in the press release is a tiny bit true. There is a movement in the blogosphere to get an anti-Expelled site, www.expelledexposed.com, rated higher on search engine results for the keyword, “Expelled.” Whether that equates to suppressing the movie is an exaggeration.
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It seems the creators of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed failed to obtain permission from the estate of John Lennon to play about 25 seconds of his song, “Imagine.” His widow, Yoko Ono, is not amused, according to the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
Details are here.
The movie opens in theaters nationwide tomorrow, despite potential legal woes. There have also been allegations that the makers plagiarized animations of cell mechanics from Harvard-affiliated XVIVO and from PBS.
Intelligent Design apparently does not include intellectual honesty.
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I realize I have spent an inordinate amount of time and space critiquing the Leader’s Guide for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but a careful examination of this so-called resource is valuable. Parsing it allows me to address the fallacies and inconsistencies inherent in the movie, which opens Friday.
So far, I have examined the Guide’s own presentations of the scientific “proof” against and cultural consequences of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Guide — typical of many anti-evo websites — takes quotes out of context, misquotes, repeats factual errors, ignores standard rules of logical argumentation and in general provides no scientific basis for the claim that Intelligent Design is a viable scientific theory.
The end of the Guide its readers a list of sources to read, and suggests “talking points” for discussion leaders, pastors and teachers to use.
The source list is hopelessly biased toward only one side of the so-called debate. Under normal circumstances, a reference guide would include the major works on both sides of an issue. In this case, though the Guide quotes them several times, neither Darwin’s The Origin of Species or The Descent of Man are on the suggested reading list. Nor is any modern resource, printed or electronic, on evolutionary theory.
One single source that might be considered pro-evolution is Daniel Dennett‘s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. The rest (excepting Hitler’s Mein Kampf and a letter by Karl Marx) are all pro-ID. There are no links to pro-evolution websites, of which there are a multitude. If the premise of the movie and the Guide is to “teach the controversy,” then omitting evolution resources belies the premise.
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 The premise of the anti-evolution movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, is that a “Darwinian” hegemony routinely suppresses scientists who try to bring religious faith into discussions of science. In truth, no such situation exists.
Omitted from the movie are scientists who are in fact religious and have no problem with accommodating evolution and science in general within their beliefs. It appears the creators of the movie deliberately ignored such scientists to prop up the movie’s false dichotomy between faith and science.
Details are here. It’s worth the read, believe me.
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