Year's second Sarah Palin film bombs at box office
If you thought the first Sarah Palin documentary, The Undefeated, bombed at the box office, wait until you see what happened to the latest nonfiction film to focus on the conservative gadfly.
Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, filmmaker Nick Broomfield's unflattering look at the Alaska governor-turned-presidential hopeful, grossed only around $7,000 in six locations during its opening weekend. Freestyle Releasing distributed the film.
That shakes out to about $389 per day per theater -- meaning that an average of fewer than 40 people a day saw the film in each location. That's like the equivalent of the popcorn line on Saturday afternoon for box office winner Dolphin Tale.
Given that Broomfield's work is hardly pro-Palin, the political figure's core followers probably didn't turn out in force to see the movie.
But with her presidential hopes waning in the last few months, perhaps her box office powers are dropping, too.
In July, Arc Entertainment released the pro-candidate Undefeated to about $70,000 at 10 locations -- a performance that was also weak.
Meanwhile, the early sales of two new books on Palin and her controversial career and life are off to slow starts.
Despite huge publicity, sales for both The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, by political writer Joe McGinnis, and Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin's Crosshairs, by Levi Johnston, the former boyfriend of Palin's daughter Bristol Palin, failed to climb the charts.
© Copyright Thomson Reuters 2024. All rights reserved.