At the NEA RA last July there was concern among some delegates about the anticipated release of Waiting for Superman. There were even a few items brought to the floor that called for the NEA to spend a couple of million bucks in a counter media attack.
But the NEA leadership saw to it that calmer heads prevailed. And they turned out to be prescient.
Right-winger Rick Hess looks at the Superman box office in his blog at EdWeek.
The movie is now finishing its theatrical run, dribbling out of the last few theaters. How big a splash did it make? As of December 13, the flick had done $6.4 million in the box office. That translates to something like 800,000 tickets, and makes it the 143rd ranked movie in the past 365 days. It finished third in domestic receipts among 2010 documentaries, trailing Babies and Oceans. All-time–in what had to be dispiriting for Guggenheim, director of the very successful An Inconvenient Truth—Waiting For Superman ranks 19th in domestic box office sales among documentaries (and, unlike with Babies or Oceans, the international appeal of WFS is almost nonexistent). Its $6.4 million haul lagged the domestic performance of top-performing documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 ($119.2 million), Tupac: Resurrection (#16 at $7.7 million), and Babies (#17 at $7.3 million).
As Hess himself points out, this is surprising given the amount of free PR the movie received from NBC, Oprah and other celebrities.
But the problem is that the pro-charter, anti-union message of Superman can be found in more than a single movie. There are still plenty of political demagogues, including Hess, that are trying to sell tickets to the Superman agenda, even while the movie’s ticket sales tanked.
Fred Klonsky 