I spent much of last week trying to avoid all that hysteria about Wall-E being “left-wing, America-hating propaganda,” even though I’m absolutely positive that The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was responsible for that steep rise in an interest in black magic amongst teens in the early 50s, and also that there would be neither PETA nor any form of federal gun control if it weren’t for Bambi. But what can I say? For whatever reason, I wasn’t in the mood to hear Steve Jobs compared to Joseph Goebbels, or to sound the violins for the poor demonized corporations, any of which could surely rule our state better than any democracy. Chalk it up to the holiday, I guess!

But now, here comes Frank Rich, late to the party but determined to shoot it up nonetheless. “Wall-E For President!” his NY Times Op-Ed column shouts from the headline––the exclamation mine, but definitely implied. …Read more

Bloggy reactions are starting to float in on that whole MPAA vs. Taxi to the Dark Side thing, and although we’re sill seeing the predictable squabbling over ideology, pretty much everyone seems to be united on one thing: the poster itself is far less offensive than the MPAA’s stance on it.

AJ Schnack spoke with Taxi director Alex Gibney, who characterized the ruling as “a cover-up”:

Removing the hood is the ultimate cover-up. [The U.S.] didn’t use to do that sort of thing. Removing the hood sends the same message as the Bush administration with the CIA tapes. It’s OK to do it, it’s just not OK to show it.

Hammering home roughly the same message, The Cinetrix proposes a protest campaign:

This movie needs to be seen. These images need to be seen. Fuck, I’m willing to run the one-sheet image every day here until the decision is reversed.

Meanwhile, the boys at conservative film blog LIBERTAS think that the very idea of the film is reprehensible…which is why they’re mad at the MPAA for drawing more attention to it by giving the poster an air of snuff. In a post broken by images of the World Trade Center aflame, Dirty Harry writes:

…Read more

As I noted yesterday, conservative film blog Libertas is trying to push the meme that Sicko is a box office failure. To quote directly from the source:

Sicko [is] now taking in around the same per screen as the disaster License To Wed…Between the theatre and Moore\’s take, this looks to be a big-time money loser for the distributors and a stunning rebuke of Moore who no longer seems capable of convincing even the millions who agree with him to sit through two hours of his lies and obfuscations.

Obviously, this writer wants Sicko to fail, so no matter what the actual data says, he’s going to spin it to make his case (sound familiar?) But just for the sake of argument, lets take a look at evidence on both sides.

Sicko is a huge failure!!!

By this point in its release Fahrenheit 9/11 had grossed six times Sicko’s current take (although, it was also playing on over twice as many screens). Though the film opened undeniably strong, from week-to-week, Sicko’s per screen average has dropped dramatically, indicating that the pic has limited appeal beyond Moore’s choir.

As for the assertion that the doc is doing about as well as a certain Robin Williams trainwreck: according to the latest numbers from Box Office Mojo, Sicko’s daily per screen average is actually about 20 percent higher than that of License to Wed, although as both films are making far less than $1,000 per screen per day, that discrepancy currently only accounts for about a $100 each weekday. So yeah, it’s close. But…

Sicko is a huge hit!!!

…is it fair to compare the box office take of a documentary showing on 700 screens to a heavily-hyped, star-studded blockbuster wannabe booked at almost 4 times as many theaters?

At indieWIRE, Steve Ramos looks at Sicko’s gross in a different context: its success in relation to other high-profile documentaries, and amongst other sub-1000 screen releases. “It took the global warming film An Inconvenient Truth around six weeks to earn $11 million by early July 2006, a mark Sicko surpassed in just three weeks of release.” Apparently working off of these numbers for weekend gross, Ramos notes that in its third week, Sicko remained by far the smallest release in the overall top ten.

According to indieWIRE’s box office chart, which is based on Rentrak data and is limited only to “specialty” releases, Sicko is the highest grossing indie film currently in the market by a large margin. It’s #6 when ranked by per screen average amongst other indies, but it’s also playing on over 40 times as many screens as any other picture in the top ten.

Final verdict: As an indie film and as a documentary, Sicko is doing well, but it’s hardly looking like the mainstream phenomenon that Moore’s last two films became. Considering Moore’s star power, Sicko’s considerable marketing budget in relation to other indie films, and the fact that Moore’s last movie is the highest grossing documentary of all time, it is, so far, an unquestionable disappointment.