It appears that the director of Atlas Shrugged: The Debacle is mooning the invisible hand and will go Galt:
Twelve days after opening “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1,” the producer of the Ayn Rand adaptation said Tuesday that he is reconsidering his plans to make Parts 2 and 3 because of scathing reviews and flagging box office returns for the film.
“Critics, you won,” said John Aglialoro, the businessman who spent 18 years and more than $20 million of his own money to make, distribute and market “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1,” which covers the first third of Rand’s dystopian novel. “I’m having deep second thoughts on why I should do Part 2.”
“Atlas Shrugged” was the top-grossing limited release in its opening weekend, generating $1.7 million on 299 screens and earning a respectable $5,640 per screen. But the the box office dropped off 47% in the film’s second week in release even as “Atlas Shrugged” expanded to 425 screens, and the movie seemed to hold little appeal for audiences beyond the core group of Rand fans to whom it was marketed.
***“Why should I put up all of that money if the critics are coming in like lemmings?” Aglialoro said. “I’ll make my money back and I’ll make a profit, but do I wanna go and do two? Maybe I just wanna see my grandkids and go on strike.”
There can only be one response to his threats to Go Galt and refuse to bring us parts 2 and 3:
Emma
This on top of Obama’s little lesson in kicking the press this morning? My day is topfilled with joy.
Shoemaker-Levy 9
And liberal bloggers. Don’t forget the liberal bloggers.
J.W. Hamner
Is it really “going on strike” when nobody wants to give you a job?
Jay in Oregon
I was reading an AS review on Rotten Tomatoes last night, and the reviewer referred to it as Atlas Shrugged: The Phantom Menace.
I giggled for like 5 minutes.
Alex Gurney Halleck-S.
But the audience will be there! Look at how many comments Ron Paul got on a website!
PurpleGirl
So he didn’t start filming pieces of parts 2 and 3 while filming part 1? That was stupid.
If he goes Galt now and doesn’t film parts 2 and 3 he won’t be able to sell Atlas Shrugged: The Director’s Cut (A 3-DVD boxed set with a special printing of the novel).
Jeff Darcy
The Audience Shrugged.
Jon H
And apparently the core group of Rand fans is much smaller than the number of people who buy her books every year. Probably because most of the people who buy her books each year quickly realize the book is crap and whoever told them to read it is a moron.
Bob Loblaw
Ok Cole, I think you’ve embarrassed yourself enough now. It’s time to put down the Atlas Shrugged-Andrew Sullivan crackpipe and admit you have a problem.
We can’t in good conscience mock Hermione_chan for her fixation with E.D. Kain if she isn’t even the most obsessive person here.
Dave
Not so fast there, Chuckles. As of Sunday, your film had grossed just over $3M and dropped to 18th on the weekly gross list. Half that $3M in ticket money goes to the theaters. So you only have to make up $18.5M to break even.
But wait! You forgot about residuals. So when you print those Blu-Rays for Regnerey to pimp out to the teahadists and make your profit, remember that some of that money is going to your main actors. Never mind paying to make the DVDs in the first place.
That invisible hand is a real bitch…
Jon H
@PurpleGirl: “So he didn’t start filming pieces of parts 2 and 3 while filming part 1? That was stupid.”
To be fair, it’s not like he had to worry the cast would move on to other things and become unavailable for the sequels.
bemused
Paul Ryan must be crushed.
Andrew Beck
@Dave
I’m pretty sure they’ll make the money back on DVD and Blu-Ray. Conservative organizations will buy them up and give them out as free gifts for attending conservative conferences, subscribing to magazines, etc. It’s the conservative welfare they use.
quaint irene
No worries, John. If it’s good enough for Mel Brooks (History of the World, Part l) it’s good enough for you.
Yeah, all those meanie liberal critics ganging up on you. Kinda like how the architectural community ganged up on Roark in ‘The Fountainhead.” How often nature imitates art!
quaint irene
No worries, John. If it’s good enough for Mel Brooks (History of the World, Part l) it’s good enough for you.
Yeah, all those meanie liberal critics ganging up on you. Kinda like how the architectural community ganged up on Roark in ‘The Fountainhead.” because he was too controversial. How often life imitates art!
Trinity
@Jon H: My first husband strongly suggested that I read AS and gave me his “prized copy”. I can’t recall if I made it through the first chapter.
We were divorced within a year.
Roger Moore
@Bob Loblaw:
Sure we can. We just have to mock Cole even harder for his fixations. This is Balloon-Juice; we can do it!
quaint irene
And I gotta add. Even the movie poster was kind of lame.
Canadian Shoggoth
Wait for studio to go bankrupt, buy rights at firesale prices. make campy spoof musical of part 3 (Galt’s speech of doom) ala Rocky Horror/Repo the Genetic Opera, Profit!
fasteddie9318
By his own excuse for a philosophy, shouldn’t Aglialoro recognize that the market has deemed his effort insufficient and redouble his efforts toward making a better product?
MikeBoyScout
Springtime for the Invisible Hand.
As sheety as the real world is, the Atlas Shrugged (Part 1) the MOVIE has been a real comic relief.
Nemesis
Look! An AS Pt1 banner atop this thread. Oh, the irony burns!
Lurking Canadian
The true Randian response would be to gather all extant copies of the movie and blow them up in a fit of pique.
Bobby
Atlas Slumped
Jon H
@fasteddie9318: “By his own excuse for a philosophy, shouldn’t Aglialoro recognize that the market has deemed his effort insufficient and redouble his efforts toward making a better product?”
See, he’s analyzed the issue with his faculty for reason, and concluded that the film is a superior and flawless creative production, as it must be, being a product of his faculty for reason, he being a successful captain of the fitness industry and thus a Producer. Therefore, if the movie is failing in the market, it must be because of the friggin looters.
Nemesis
@Canadian Shoggoth: The Rand people own the rights. The director was “rushed” into production by the impending rights expiration, hence, his excuse for creating a floater.
russell
what a whiner.
Chuck Butcher
Please do
AkaDad
The invisible hand of the free market gave Atlas Shrugged the middle finger.
Earl Butz
Atlas Whined.
Turgidson
This post and comments accompanying are full of win. A hearty LOL indeedy from me.
dj spellchecka
red state pay per view might save this…
won’t be the first time a cheaply made, poorly acted, badly reviewed fantasy film ends up finding a cult audience.
wolverines!
bcw
Someone mentioned “the Producers” indirectly. We need to think about this – this may be the big money winner of the century: Atlas Shrugged, the musical. Hit up a few hundred blue haired teapartiers for $100K front money, offering 30% of profits each; throw in the US Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity and other front groups for $10M-$20M a pop; write “Springtime for Dagny and Readon Steel;” close in one night and retire rich.
A whole lot safer than writing a sure hit like “Springtime for Hitler.”
Jon H
The amusing thing is that this guy’s rushing of a crap movie is not unlike the scene in the book where a bureaucrat forces the train to roll with an unsuitable engine (or whatever) on a track through a tunnel, and everybody dies.
MikeBoyScout
For christ’s sake, get out there and see this movie!
Think of the children! Those poor children!
Yamara
Bob the Angry Flower has already done Atlas Shrugged 2…
cthulhu
I have to say that I was hoping that they would go forward with making Part III into a musical. But life never works out quite that well…
AkaDad
@Jon H:
Everyone here was dying to see this and you just spoiled it!
maus
@Shoemaker-Levy 9: Yeah, still tempted to sneak in, myself.
Nellcote
His grandkids should strike him with large sticks for blowing their inheritance on such crap.
Jon H
@bcw: “We need to think about this – this may be the big money winner of the century: Atlas Shrugged, the musical.”
Wasn’t “Urinetown” something like this?
“According to Lockstock and Little Sally, a twenty-year drought has caused a terrible water shortage, making private toilets unthinkable. All restroom activities are done in public toilets controlled by a megacorporation[7] called “Urine Good Company” (or UGC). To control water consumption, people have to pay to use the amenities. There are harsh laws ensuring that people pay to pee, and if they are broken, the offender is sent to a penal colony called “Urinetown”, never to return.”
The Fool
Atlas Wanked — and not even the neocon circle jerk gave a shit
Nutella
It’s all the critics’ fault. Right.
gex
@Nutella: Just what I was going to key on. Clearly market forces work in every other realm, but when his shit fails it is because of mean people and not the marketplace.
gex
@Roger Moore: Yes we can.
bjacques
@Jon H 40:
I was wondering what that was! It was playing here in Amsterdam a week or two ago. Don’t watch Waterworld before seeing this…
Paul in KY
Could it ever have ended any other way? Hee hee!
Brachiator
Ah, well. Too bad they couldn’t get David Manning to review Atlas Shrugged. “He” would have praised it to high heaven.
Ezra
@Shoemaker-Levy 9: Ooh, and podcasters who review terrible movies.
gex
His grandkids will probably be able to fully appreciate the ultimate Randian move:
strikingthrowing a temper tantrumWoodrowfan
yes, because no film that the critics all hated ever made money (cough) American Pie I, II and III (cough)
...now I try to be amused
Future trivia question: What do John Aglialoro and Ralph Bakshi have in common?
lacp
What kind of Randian super-hero is this asshole? If he were true to his principles he’d realize that when life hands you lemmings you make lemmingade. Jeez.
Calouste
@bcw:
So very appropriate that that movie is called The Producers.
Bob L
But think of the titles for Atlas Shrugs II & III; The Looters Strike Back & Return of the Producers or The Two Speeches and Return of the Galt and so forth. All that beautiful snarkyness lost because these stupid libertarians won’t throw more money away.
Tonal Crow
So it’s “Going Galt ™” — and a great thing — when GOPers do it, but it’s “going on strike” — and a horror that must be prevented by all means necessary — when the common man does it?
Amirite?
Weldon Berger
I think it’s important to note that Aglialoro never said the film was good; only that critics trashed it. He did say that “[t]he New York Times gave us the most hateful review of all. They didn’t cover it,” thereby indicating that he thinks newspapers were obligated to review the film rather than exercising their own discretion. How anti-Galtian can one get?
Tonal Crow
How’s he going to “make a profit” when the movie cost $20M to produce, and it’s rapidly dying after having grossed only about $3M in theatres? http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=daily&id=atlasshrugged.htm . Are the Koch brothers going to buy 10 millions DVDs?
Dennis
Aglialoro seems to be oblivious to one very obvious possibility: people stayed away from the theaters because the movie simply didn’t look very good.
Speaking as one who enjoyed the book, flaws and all, that’s why I stayed away.
demz taters
It’s not like this Galtian overlord doesn’t know how to make $3 million the easy way.
ChrisFS
You can’t go on strike unless you are actually employed by someone, and it’s not a strike if you just do it by yourself, you need a group, or …union, to organize a strike altogether.
Tom65
Maybe they should have released it as Medea Builds A Railroad
wenchacha
Oh noes!!! Whatever will all true lovers of film art do if Grampy takes his pouts to the grandkids’ place and deprives us all of real honest cinema?
fish
Perhaps they should have called it “A Randian Carol”
Jon H
@Tom65: “Maybe they should have released it as Medea Builds A Railroad”
Or even better, “Madea Gets Railroaded”
Jon H
Note that he’s not threatening to shutter his company Cybex and thus deny us his productive essence.
Clue: Going Galt doesn’t work if you’re going Galt only in your half-assed dilettante hobby that nobody was buying anyway.
joes527
@lacp:
I am SO stealing that.
Joel
I hope Plinkett reviews Atlas Shrugged. I’d see that.
Ken
the top-grossing limited release in its opening weekend
I love statistics like this, where they throw in lots of extra qualifiers. I think of them as “baseball stats” – the sort of things the sportscasters (or the computers in the booths) come up with to fill the time between pitches. “He’s 3 for 13 against left-handed batters on days over 80 degrees” and so forth.
oboe
Fine! If you critics think my movie is so shitty, I WON’T MAKE TWO MORE!!!
kthxbi!
jim filyaw
if i had my way, every m.s.m. hack who swooned at the ‘seriousness’ of paul ryan would (ala the movie ‘red dragon) be super glued to a theater seat with his eyelids stapled to his forehead and forced to watch the director’s cut of this trash until he starts babbling about the wisdom of ayn rand.
NonyNony
@Tonal Crow:
I’m sure he’s counting on DVD sales and the international market. I’m sure that if he is, he will be disappointed. I can’t imagine that there are many folks in the international market who would want to watch this tripe either.
The man was delusional enough to think there was a sizeable market for a theatrical version of “Ayn Rand’s Mary Sue and Sockpuppet Theater”. If you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid on THAT there’s almost nothing you won’t believe.
And on top of that I’d argue that once you subscribe to the Religion of Objectivism, you’ve proven yourself a Giant All-Day Sucker and there’s probably very little that strokes your ego that you won’t believe.
Corpsicle
Can’t wait for the porn parody.
Rick Taylor
Uhh, what exactly is that metaphor supposed to mean?
Midnight Marauder
@Andrew Beck:
I don’t think even conservative welfare can put this failure back in the black.
Ever.
IrishGirl
Stupid millionaire…the critics didn’t win….the Market won because the audience didn’t like your film. Funny how they love the mysterious hand of the market when its in their favor but not so much when it isn’t.
Horatio
Honestly–since when does anyone care what critics write? In the past ten years in particular, film critics have absolutely trashed many films that have gone on to do huge box office. While the studios still like for their films to be positively reviewed, the days of kowtowing to critics with press junkets and guaranteed press screenings are long gone. Film critics are a dying breed and blaming the lack of success for his film on its critical reception is simply lame. What he really needed was to spend another $20 million on marketing, because that’s what gets people in the seats…
NonyNony
@Rick Taylor:
My parsing of it is “the critics are all following along with one another and bashing it”.
I admit – I needed a LOT of context to get that read, but it’s the only one that makes sense. When I originally read it I thought he was complaining that the critics ignored it at first but now they were all coming in one after another to see it. But since that isn’t a complaint I have to go with the read above…
Paul Hobbs
It was a shitty book with an absurd premise. The dialog was laughable to me at the age of sixteen.
How in the hell could anyone have made a decent film out that piece of crap?
Cerberus
Oh, libertarians, you are always the same.
“It’s not that I’m a failure in creating anything worth a damn to humanity, it’s all the damn moochers and leeches of society seeking to destroy my brilliance that has cost me.”
At least, it’s consistent to the book’s poutrage that mean old government is trying to shut down magic working things because increased accidents and destroyed infrastructure is exactly what centralized governments (rather than decentralized rich bastards exploiting centralized governments) want.
I still don’t know how anyone can even pretend to respect a philosophy that regardless of everything else about it that is wrong as fuck it is at its base most repeated level utterly indistinguishable from a 6-year-old throwing a temper tantrum because mommy has to go to work today.
Bex
@Bobby: Atlas Shrank.
Death Panel Truck
Blaming the critics is always so much easier than just admitting you made a shitty movie no one gives a fuck about.
soonergrunt
@lacp:
Where would you like your internets delivered?
soonergrunt
@Midnight Marauder:
And the upside to that is that it will be extremely unlikely that this movie will be remade, or that any other Ayn Rand movie will ever be made again, after the level of fail seen here.
Matt
In related news, I’d like to announce that I will no longer be having casual sex with supermodels – I’M ON STRIKE! ;)
JoJo
I have an idea for the sequels. After John Galt makes the sign of the dollar, I’d cut to some ‘Simpson’s Comic Book Guy” type loser wakes up in his basement lair before heading out to his fast food job.
catclub
@Paul Hobbs: “The dialog was laughable to me at the age of sixteen.”
Thank goodness for Tolkien!
grassroot
Atlas Shriveled.
Jay in Oregon
@Death Panel Truck:
I think Penny Arcade nailed this argument:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/24/
Phoebe
That picture makes my heart sing. Like Madeline Khan at the end of Young Frankenstein.
pseudonymous in nc
All the reporting suggested that the POS only went into production so that they could retain the option, so it’s hardly a surprise that he’ll either sit on his hands for another decade or look to shop the rights somewhere else.
LittlePig
@Corpsicle: “Medea Pulls A Train”
bcw
Corpsicle said
Can’t wait for the porn parody.
— Can’t wait to find out what “going Galt” would be…
something to do with santorum, I expect.
jim filyaw
don’t be too sure nobody can make money off this bomb. just consider what the ownership of ‘plan nine from outer space’ or ‘reefer madness’ would be worth now. o.k., i admit those movies had better source material.
Badtux
So the market’s answer to the question “Who is John Galt” apparently is, “Who cares?”. Alrighty, then!
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
tomdurk
Porn Parody title: Medea pulls a Train.
scarshapedstar
This had to be the plan all along. It just had to be.
I mean, for the producer to go Galt… it’s the only way it could have ended. This is the most epic performance art piece of all time.
tomdurk
Damn. I should have read all the entries before that. Great minds & all that
Red Jenny
If he won’t tell you the ending, I will. Atlas turns out to be Fontaine, you kill Andrew Ryan and save the Little Sisters.
Hart Williams
Answering the age old question, “If The Invisible Hand of the Market Bitch-Slapped You and You Didn’t Want to Hear It, Would It Make a Sound?”
Evidently not.
Michael R. Brown
except for this: BREAKING! atlas shrugged pts 2 & 3 to be made – producer comes out swinging! http://tiny.cc/9pu4q
MasonMcD
@Corpsicle:
Atlas Stroked part 2: The Napping.
The Sailor
The pRon version?
Atlas Shagged
The Sailor
Color me not surprised that a Rayn fan is dependent upon gov’t largess. (h/t to the commenter that linked http://www.milforddailynews.com/homepage/x126630891