Ben Stein shows he's no Michael Moore
by John Byrne
Link to ArticleIf numbers are any indication, Ben Stein has shown he's no Michael Moore.Stein's Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a documentary which makes an argument for intelligent design over the theory of evolution, debuted at just number eight among the top ten grossing movies last week. The film made $1.2 million on Friday in 1,052 theaters. By comparison, Michael Moore's 'Sicko' raken in $23.9 million its opening weekend from just 441 theaters, and Fahrenheit 9/11 did $23.9 million from only 868 slots. "Playing in 1,052 theaters, the pic distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures earned $1.2M Friday for what should be a $3.4M weekend," penned Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily. "But the per screen average for Friday was a feeble $1,130 (that $3,000 ballyhooed on the Internet would be for the entire weekend), showing there wasn't any pent-up demand for the film despite an aggressive publicity campaign. So much for the conservative argument that people would flock to films not representing the "agenda of liberal Hollywood.'"On Friday, The New York Times' Jeannette Catsoulis called the movie "one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time... a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry." Expelled's producers have also been accused of copyright violations -- they're said not to have secured the rights for the use of John Lennon's "Imagine" and The Killer's "All these things I have done." Among the more popular flicks? The Forbidden Kingdom, the Jet Li-Jackie Chan synergy is set to score $21.1 million for the weekend; number two is Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which netted $5.9 million on Friday. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. If you have accounts on these bookmarking sites, you can post this story to share it with others.
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