Pressing The Flesh

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

This past weekend, the top of the box office belonged to X-Men: The Last Stand. It made over $122 million dollars during the four-day Memorial Day weekend, averaging a little over $33,000 per screen. Very impressive numbers, to be sure.

So what film averaged nearly $92,000 per screen? Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

I'm not posting this to make any conclusions. I'm not hear to blow the trumpet for Al Gore, or to posit that somehow Al Gore's film beat up on the X-Men in any way, shape or form.

This is all I'm saying - An Inconvenient Truth ran on four screens this Memorial Day weekend. Two in New York and two in Los Angeles. It's total box office thus far is almost a half-million dollars.

I don't know about the West Coast, but here on the East Coast, this was probably one of the nicest Memorial Day weekends we've experienced in a long time, in terms of weather.

Despite that, this film ran to what had to be sold-out houses throughout the weekend in order for it to pull numbers like this. Certainly, one could argue that the audience was concentrated, because of the small number of screens, and that it wouldn't have had such a high average if the film ran on more screens.

Still, it will be interesting to me to see how the film does as it opens wider. I know for a fact that I wouldn't want to go listen to Al Gore talk about global warming on a Memorial Day weekend... and I AGREE with Al Gore. But at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of people this past weekend did just that.

I will offer this simple thought tangentially related - I'm curious why the issue of the environment and energy has to be seen through a partisan lens? I don't know if Al Gore is running for President again in 2008, and I'm probably in the minority of Democrats when I say that I hope he doesn't.

But can't we all agree that environmental issues are important ones? The stewardship of this world that we live in is a worthy cause, regardless of political affiliation? That it's simply a matter of time before we evolve past the notion of a fossil-fuel driven economy, and the sooner we tackle the problem, the less enormous it will be to solve? Forget the geopolitical ramifications of whether we get our oil from the Middle East, or if somehow we were magically to receive it all from Alaska. Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier if we simply didn't NEED to get it? Regardless of its location, it will run out eventually, and so why would we be so selfish as to think "well, it's not going to happen in my lifetime, so why should I worry about it...." It affects each and every one of us... regardless of which side of the aisle we sit.

There are so many debates which polarize us. I just don't understand why this should be one of them.

We'll continue to follow the progress of An Inconvenient Truth as it opens wider in the next few weeks.

Tags: An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore, box office, global warming, environment, X-Men

Posted by FleshPresser at 10:58 AM /

2 Comments

JoyceB posted at 1:26 PM
I'm in rural Western Illinois & we had the hottest Memorial weekend I can remember... in the 90s Friday through Monday. Most conversation revolved around the low snow totals over recent winters, record summer heat waves & the lack of media concern over the increasing strength of the hurricane seasons. All weekend folks kept wondering if we'd skipped on into late July...

Tahoma Activist posted at 3:28 PM
I want to touch on what Joyce said - I'm in Western Washington, the state that used to be known for its rain. This Memorial Day Weekend was rainless, and that is quite unusual. North Dakota hit a hundred degrees over the weekend. And two new studies (MIT and one other one, just caught it on Hartmann) show conclusively that hurricanes have been made stronger, longer, and more devastating because of global warming.

I sincerely hope that the Repugs can pull their heads out of their backends and kick these neocon nutjobs to the curb, because it's going to take both parties to clean up this mess.

Keep up the great work!