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Live from the hinterlands, it's Entertainment Tonight with Hollywood Don Surber:
You had better odds of being struck by lightning than seeing this bomb.Okay.
The New York Post reported this morning that Brian De Palma’s “Redacted” is Hollywood’s latest BDS antiwar film to bomb at the box office. In fact, it was the H-bomb of this genre as it turned off more people than “Rendition,” “Lions for Lambs” or “In the Valley of Elah.”
Reported the Post, “it took in just $25,628 in its opening weekend in 15 theaters, which means roughly 3,000 people saw it in the entire country.”
3,000 people? In a nation of 300,000,000? That means 1-out-of-100,000 Americans saw this film.
99.999% didn’t.
Over your lifetime, your odds of dying after being struck by lightning are 1-in-83,930.
Now I'm no expert in backwoods mathematical logicification but I'm having a real problem figuring out the somewhat strained connection between the number of people choosing to go to a movie (expressed as a percentage) and the odds of an involuntary random occurrence.
But never mind that because he gets a link from the Ole Perfesser who thinks it's a kneeslapper.
Well it's no Zyzzyx Road, but a box office bomb is usually defined a film that fails to recoup its production and marketing costs by a substantial margin. For example Evan Almighty with a budget of $175 million lost approximately $89 million (because people hate God) and Windtalkers ($115 budget) lost approximately $76 million (because people hate American soldiers/native American soldiers/Nicholas Cage/ all of the above) and The Alamo ($92 million) lost $80 million (because Americans hate Mexicans who beat Americans). Since Redacted came in at slightly under $5 million budget-wise...uh, no, it's not going to be the biggest bomb ever, no matter how much the yokels want to hee-haw it up and attempt to read the cultural tea leaves.
IS REDACTED Hollywood's biggest bomb ever? It makes Heaven's Gate look like a hit.