Anti-War Movies Flop at the Box Office

 With the latest anti-war movie, Lions For Lambs, flopping at the box office I thought I would discuss this a little bit. There have been a few anti-war, anti-American films released recently and it appears as though none of them have done well. But there are more due to be released in the near future. Hollywood just doesn’t get it. They will continue to saturate the market with these films until they get one right. They will never get one right though, because they are all anti-war propaganda movies and the movie goers don’t want that.

“These movies have to be entertaining,” Harris told AFP. “You can’t just take a movie and make it anti-war or anti-torture and expect to draw people in.

“That’s what happened with ‘Rendition’ and it has been a disaster,” he said.

 People on the whole do not want to go to a movie and hear how bad America is. This whole idea of making anti-war movies DURING a war in unprecedented, even during Vietnam there were no anti-war movies until after the war. Hollywood had the decency to at least wait until our soldiers were out of harms way. Not any more though, they just couldn’t wait to start bashing America.

 This is how Lions For Lambs fared in it’s opening weekend:

even with a very moderate budget of $35 million, the political polemic was killed by moviegoers and reviewers alike this weekend, opening to a paltry $6.5 million from 2,215 theaters with an anemic per screen average as well. Even with only a 92-minute running time, the pic even fell far short of the studio’s rock-bottom expectations of $8 million. 

The film got some of the worst reviews ever for a prestige project like this — only 27% positive according to Rotten Tomatoes, and Redford’s direction was roundly criticized as was the talky script that played like a stage production.

 So why does Hollywood continue to make these movies with the dismal numbers they are drawing? The answer may be quite disturbing. While listening to a local talk show the other day I heard a theory about this. Michael Graham was interviewing a guest, I think it was Jonah Goldberg, but I am not sure. That was the question that was asked and the answer given by Goldberg was along the line of this, I don’t have the exact quote. While anti-war, blame America movies don’t play well in America, Hollywood is marketing aggressively in Europe, the American movie industry is more of an international market now and these movies will play well over there.

 Just think about that. We have men and women overseas risking their lives to defend this country and Hollywood is going to market anti-American propaganda to Europe while these people are still fighting. I find this extremely offensive. This is actually very irresponsible but I don’t find it surprising given the character of the people involved.

 They are just pushing their agenda without regard to who may be hurt by this. It is appalling.

 You can read about Hollywood’s war movies and their non success in America here and here.