JABbering Stooge

Ruh-roh. Guess who didn’t do so well at the box office this weekend?

“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” a rare documentary opening in wide release, debuted at No. 9 with $3.1 million. Released by Rocky Mountain Pictures, the film features Ben Stein as he challenges Darwinian theories that prevail in academic circles and suggests that life could have emerged through intelligent design.

Note the “wide release” bit. It’ll be important later on in my rant.

So let’s compare the rather pathetic performance of the Falling Baker* of documentaries to some other works of recent vintage.

• The last controversial documentary to come out in a presidential election year, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, pulled in $23.9 million in its opening weekend — the top-grossing movie that weekend, despite a limited release compared to Expelled.

• Ironically, the official blog for Expelled gloats that its wider release compared to Fahrenheit 9/11 is an indicator of its wider appeal than Moore’s documentary about Bush’s first term. Now do you see why I felt it was important to note the “wide release” remark?

• Another film that the Talibangelical wing of the Republican party loves to hate is The Golden Compass, based on the first book of atheist author Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. That movie (barely) topped the list in its opening weekend, grossing about $28 million when the smoke cleared that weekend. And speaking of which, did you notice at the time how the “librul” media was gleefully crowing about the failure of the movie? If The Golden Compass was a bomb, then Expelled is a Daisy Cutter!

Meanwhile, over at Dembski’s Crib, they’ve gone into full spin mode. DaveScot reached for the smelling salts over an unflattering assessment of the film over at Box Office Prophets:

I wonder why he has no problem commenting on any other movie? Is it because he can’t bring himself to say that Expelled broke the top ten in total box office receipts?

Yeah, it made the top ten in its opening weekend. So did Catwoman.

But that’s not the only mendacity perpetrated by the former Dell programmer who thinks he’s smarter than the evil “Darwinists” because he’s got a couple of patents and a self-reported IQ a couple of standard deviations above the mean. Here he is claiming that Expelled had the Second Highest Opening Box Office Gross Ev4r!!!!

Expelled easily ranks as having the second largest gross box office receipts on opening weekend of any political documentary ever. It is bested only by Fahrenheit 9/11. As of Sunday morning it has an estimated $3.2 million gross.

Sadly, No! That honor belongs to another Michael Moore documentary — SiCKO. In other words, instead of being number two, Expelled and its apologists are full of Number Two™. Even if you accept slashfilm.com’s lower $4.5 million estimate of SiCKO’s opening weekend gross, that’s still about 45% more than what Expelled brought in. Why such simple math seems to be beyond a man whose livelihood was in a field that requires solid math skills boggles the mind.

But, then again, maybe it’s not Mr. Springer’s math skills that are the issue here…

* Cf.