Blue Collar Scientist

(Update: Although I posted on Monday, the box office numbers cited below were revised, showing a very sharp drop in Expelled attendance on Sunday. The upshot is that Expelled failed to reach the $3.2 million previously reported on its opening weekend. The revised figure, now available on the page I link to, is $2,970,848.)

The box office numbers for the creationism propaganda movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, are (like any other set of numbers that measures something) interesting. Expelled barely achieved $3 million in its opening weekend, despite the producers’ expectation of $12 to $15 million.

The high opening weekend is mainly the result of getting Expelled released in lots of theaters - 1,052 of them - on a weekend when no major films were being released. And it probably doesn’t hurt that they are paying people to watch the movie, either - not something I’ve noticed on offer on any other movie I’ve wanted to see.

Through its website, Team “Expelled” is offering goodies to entice group sales in the Bible Belt and beyond, a move some call borderline bribery.

The ” ‘Expelled’ Challenge” urges schools and home-schooling groups to get students, parents and faculty to show up in force, promising donations of $5 to $10 per ticket stub for those who register.

“In speaking with Christian schools, we’ve found that hosting a school-wide ‘mandatory’ field trip is the best way to maximize your school’s earning potential,” the site explains.

Despite these advantages, on opening day, it did a dismal $1,145 per theater, and plummeted after that to less than $950 per. Compare this to the per-theater figures for An inconvenient Truth ($70,000), Super Size Me ($12,000), and Roger and Me ($20,000).

Also compare opening weekend figures: Expelled did 3.2 million in 1,052 theaters, while Sicko earned $23.9 million in just 441 theaters. Fahrenheit 9/11 earned $23.9 million in 868 theaters.

If you do some simple math, and assume four screenings per day, and that the ticket price is $7, then each showing attracted somewhere around 37 people. That’s not a lot.

Another way to evaluate this is to do actual statistics, which S. Walker at Inconcinnus Sermo has kindly completed. Go there to look at the chart. After an initial mathematical mistake, he corrected his analysis and concludes:

As you can see based on the number of theater’s that expelled opened in, it is a flop of extraordinary proportions. Although this isn’t the best way to do it (I don’t have time to sit and play with this), the residual of the expelled data is -16 standard deviations away from the predicted line.

Another question we should be asking concerns the demographics. My impression is that this movie will mainly preach to the converted - that is, closed-minded, extremist science-hating religious radicals. Most mainstream people won’t go see it. A list of states in which the movie is screening is interesting (just scroll down to the last list of states, updated April 16 - most of Lippard’s predictions are at this point moot) - you’ll note the strong bias placing the screenings in as many theaters as possible in states having a high proportion of fundamentalist Christians and Mormons. Even Alaska got two theaters, which was not the case for opening weekend on a lot of other documentaries - I think we had to wait about two weeks for An Inconvenient Truth, and longer for some other documentaries that had similar earnings.

So, to conclude: Expelled’s numbers were not very good. It appears they preached mainly to the choir. Still, Expelled is bad news. Anytime you see a big block of people conspiring to lie like this, and demonize innocent people as responsible for the Holocaust, in an appealing pop-cultural way, you’ve got a society with serious problems, and Expelled is not going to make those problems better. But it is at least clear that Expelled is not on track to being much of a success as a movie - certainly not the success that many of us were worried about leading up to the release.