Atlas Everyone Shrugged

It's a sad day for the captains of the Ayn Rand themed movie making industry:

After a middling performance during its opening weekend that was hyped in some quarters (i.e., The Hollywood Reporter), the per-screen average for this amateurish Ayn Rand adaptation (even Kyle could only muster 2.5 stars' worth of enthusiam for the movie, though he liked its message) plunged to an alarming $1,890 from $5,640 during its opening frame. Overall, the weekend's take was a scant $879,000 -- a whopping 48 percent drop despite adding 166 locations. Which certainly suggest they're running out of audience quick.

That means that at some locations, distributor Rocky Mountain Pictures will be writing checks to theaters to cover the difference between receipts and operating expenses. The only way they're likely to get the 1,000 screens the producers say they want next weekend is to rent them. And, as Kyle put it at his personal blog, "Whether the sequels get made is purely a matter of how much desire the producers have for losing money.''

There are two very upsetting things about this development:

1. J.N. wasn't in the country to see the movie with me during it's weekends (2) in theaters.

2. The glorious hand of the free market most likely won't allow them to make a sequel(s)... which means we are being robbed of a potentially brilliant third installment. You know, the one that would have included the entirely of John Galt's 80 page book ending monologue and changed cinema forever.

It's hard to fathom something funnier than an Ayn Rand movie being put to death by the free market, and then subsidized heavily back into theaters. This is a way to stick by your principles that Rand would have truly admired.