Looks Like A Good Start

Box Office: Tea Party-Fueled “Atlas Shrugged” Makes Respectable Debut
by Peter Knegt
Rocky Mountain Pictures released “Atlas Shrugged, Part I” on 299 screens this weekend, receiving a fair but not overwhelming response from audiences. The tepidly reviewed film is based on Ayn Rand’s final novel, which details a dystopian United States that collapses as government asserts control. It has received significant backing by Tea Party groups, with FreedomWorks, the Tea Party-allied group headed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, among the groups supporting the film. And according to weekend estimates, the result of their efforts was a respectable $1,676,917 gross, averaging $5,608 per theater (given its conservative audience, today’s Palm Sunday is expected to affect its numbers).

“We were very optimistic about how it was going to perform,” the film’s producer Harmon Kaslow told indieWIRE over the phone today. “And it’s performing to our expectations. The responses that we’re getting at the theaters gives us a enormous amount of optimism. We are looking to expand significantly in the next few weekends.”

Kaslow said he’s unsure of how wide “Shrugged” will go just yet but said “it could be as many as 1,000 screens.” He also said the film played best in places where there was “community-level support from various groups” and that “a lot of radio personalities really helped get the word out.”

Kaslow singled out Atlanta, Nashville, Portland and New York as markets where theaters took in five figure grosses, and noted that the bottom twenty theaters really “dragged things down.”

“Those are just markets we weren’t able to organize on a community level,” he said. “But knowing what we know now we think we can really push forward in the coming weeks.”

Putting “Shrugged”‘s numbers into context was Roadside Attractions’ release of Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator.” On an aggressive 707 screens - one of the widest openings for a film in the distributor’s seven year history - the film nearly matched “Shrugged”‘s per-theater-average even though it was on more than twice the screens. The film took in an estimated $3,924,000, averaging $5,500.