My box office mojo
A while back AJ Schnack asked a bunch of people to guess what Sicko would make at the box office. I had no idea but I guessed it wasn’t going to do the business of Farenheit 9/11 so I went for 25 million and I won! Sicko ended up taking just over 24.5 million so to be fair Jonathan Marlow was bloody close too with 24 million (but I’m holding on to my bragging rights!)
Very few documentaries are crossing the 1 million mark this year. Anthony Kaufman is worried that there may be a doc depression. Certainly, the lower than expected numbers for In The Shadow of the Moon are both surprising and worrying since a well-made doc about American astronauts feels about as close to a sure thing as you can get in this fickle business.
It’s nice to see No End in Sight so high up on the list for 2007 so far but I feel increasingly confused about how this stuff plays out. Do distributors have a better idea or is everyone scrabbling around in the dark? Perhaps this is another example of the “glut of cinema” - too many docs competing for a limited movie-going audience.