LOL. I’ll be surprised if it plays anywhere other than small theaters in New York, Chicago and LA.
So this would be Non-A?
I don’t think it’s POSSIBLE for a movie with a $5M budget and no-name actors to open at #1, no matter what it’s about or how good it is.
To be followed, no doubt, by Atlas Shrugged 2: Static Electric Boogaloo
Is that normal for a feature film?
It’ll follow the Left Behind formula – a cinematic flop, but doing well enough on DVD to make the series profitable.
Nearly none of the book is particularly philosophic nor political. There’s something like 150 pages of story, 800 pages that list off everything that sucks about being the citizen of a Communist nation, and the 50 page speech. Outside of that one speech, nearly everything is about the experience of Communism and you can’t say that Ayn Rand was talking out of her ass on that one, seeing as she was a former citizen of a Communist nation.
In terms of the story, I wouldn’t say that it’s particularly better or worse than most 50s era Sci-Fi novels. The characters are super flat and have sex scenes that are entirely lacking in erotic appeal to people of modern day, and all of it is just an excuse to take a look at the SF scenario.
So really, all you’re left with is the 50 page Viva la Free Market speech, which is easy enough to skip past and frankly can fairly well be forgiven seeing as, for a person coming out of the USSR during the height of the Cold War, a free market nation would be a pretty clear winner in terms of where you’d rather live. If I’d been without a bath for a year, I’d be waxing lyrical about bathtubs as soon as I had access to one again.
It’d have to play at a festival, kill, and do gangbusters critically (to get distribution in the first place, it doesn’t seem to have it just yet). Even still I have trouble imagining ANY distribution company trusting that cast and crew enough to open in anywhere near the number of theatres it’ll require (it depends on what type of year it opens in, of course).
I have to be honest, I don’t really trust the dude from 90210 as a director. We shall see.
Sounds like nearly all of it is political.
You’re on. I’ve got $10 bucks even money that Variety doesn’t list it as opening at number 1 for its first week of release.
Let me in on that action!
Ah, missed the part about the low budget.
Well, I’ll honor that bet, since you were the first. I didn’t have $ amount in mind, but what about $25?
I’m guessing they’re thinking of non-traditional marketing techniques. So, unless it’s a limited release film, then I still think it has a chance at getting #1.
Why? That would be unheard of.
I don’t think it has much chance at getting wide release. It’s got a niche audience at best. An old one too. The kiddies don’t know or care about Ayn Rand, and there aren’t any sparkly vampires in it. Even movies that open wide can’t hit number one without getting a good share people under 30. Left Behind had a bigger fan base than Ayn Rand, and that still tanked. I don’t see this coming out of nowhere and getting Chris Nolan numbers.
That was the method used to gin up box office numbers for The Omega Code and Fireproof. Empty “sold out” theaters, all the tickets having been bought by the producers to get their film on the chart.
That’d be like saying that a book about my life growing up in the US is a political novel, because it’s about life under the politics of the US.
Ignore that last post. I should have said:
I suppose that technically you’re right. I would better have said that very little of it is glurge, which is what Dio seemed to be intimating. Itemized lists from first-hand knowledge of a political situation is journalism. Either you think the USSR was a wonderful place to live – which goes against all evidence from reading The Gulag Archipelago to witnessing the implosion of the country – or you can’t really complain about 90% of what’s in Atlas Shrugged.
Atlas Shrugged is not about the Soviet Union, it’s about a completely fictional and completely implausible government – a strawman for any kind of progressive idealism or social responsibilty caricaturized as “collectivists,” and argues in favor of replacing it with an equally fictional overclass of superior “creators” and “builders” who will rule the world in her own utopian ideal of unchecked, sociopathic capitalism. She was pretty much the Ann Coulter of her time. The only thing she had going for her philosophically was that she was an atheist. Everything else was based on paranoid false assumptions and an elitist loathing for ordinary human beings.
She also had that icky “real men don’t court or ask for sex, they just rape” thing going on.
She was political in an sense, but her poltics were based on paranoid fantasies, not reality. Yes, I know she escaped from the Soviets, but the political ideology she savages in Atlas Shrugged was not the Soviet Union, and was not something that would ever exist in the real world. It’s about a believable as the Psychlons in Battlefield Earth.
Rand was from a well to do bourgeois family who owned a pharmaceuticals factory. Everything they owned was confiscated by the Soviets including their house and their clothing; it left her with a chip but also a notion that if Communism was the worst form of government then that which is farthest away must be the best. Some of her philosophy is good and basically common sense (there is much to be said for “enlightened egoism” for example) but she had ridiculous beliefs about the inherent goodness of corporations. Her ideal would seem to be America ca. 1900, which was indeed a great time to live if you were wealthy but then- when isn’t? If you were poor or a member of the Les Miserables in anyway you were soundly screwed for $3 per week and no benefits and likely to have your head bashed in if you complained too loudly; it was as much of an oppressive oligarchy as Stalin, just very different.
Rand was also a homophobe and racist and with a big dose of “I think therefore it am” opinionation. More than anything else she was a dreadful author- I’ve read worse but I doubt I’ve read worse who sold more books than she did.
“Classic”. Heh.
Michael Bay’s ideas are probably more nuanced and grown up.