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Did Lone Ranger, The Purge, and White House Down Tank Due to Politics?

Yes, if all crime is legal I'm sure the yuppies are what you'll have to worry about most of all.
July 15, 2013

That's the argument that Kyle Smith makes over at the New York Post:

The summer’s big winners at the box office are mostly mindless spectacle: "Iron Man 3," "Fast 6," "Man of Steel," plus cute family fare like "Monsters University" and "Despicable Me 2" and the buddy comedy "The Heat." What they all have in common is that they pretty much lack any hint of a political argument.

That won’t stop Hollywood from trying to sneak, or rather ram, PC messages into its movies, but for the most part the ones that try are doing badly, notably "White House Down," "The Lone Ranger" and "The Purge."

You should read the whole thing. To be honest, I'm not convinced.

Let's consider The Purge first. Not only did The Purge not tank, it's a solid hit: The absurd anti-Tea Party film has grossed almost $64M on a $3M budget. Describing this film as a hit isn't "spin," as Smith suggests, but fact. And, frankly, it's entirely unsurprising, performing right in line with similar cheapo horror films (Insidious grossed $54M on a $1.5M budget; Sinister grossed $48M on a $3M budget; The Woman in Black grossed $54M on a $17M budget; Saw grossed $55M on a $1.2M budget).

Granted, the drop off was a bit steeper for The Purge than most of these films, but it's not entirely unexpected: the 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th grossed $65M on a $19M budget but dropped a staggering 80 percent between weekends one and two. High-concept horror flicks are frequently front-loaded, in terms of box office.

Is it possible that The Purge took a hit because of its silly politics? Sure. But its box office was more or less in line with what one would expect for such a project.

White House Down and The Lone Ranger, meanwhile, were flops. Super-flops. Super-duper megaflops. And both White House Down and The Lone Ranger had silly politics, there can be no doubt about it. But I'm extremely hesitant to suggest that the silliness of the politics are what caused them to flop.

Unlike The Purge, which gave off a whiff of the political in its advertising campaign, White House Down and The Lone Ranger were marketed as action-comedies. Audiences had no reason to suspect they were going to get blindsided opening weekend—and they still didn't go.

White House Down was a bomb from the get-go, coming in fourth in its opening frame and grossing a mere $63M domestically through this weekend on its $150M budget. It'll struggle to earn half that at home. Similarly, The Lone Ranger came in a distant second on its opening weekend, grossing just $29M.* It has grossed just $71M domestically on a $225M budget and will be lucky to crack $90M.

As I said, these were bombs from the start. This suggests that audiences had decided to stay away long before they had warning from family or friends that they were in for a series of political jabs. Audiences simply weren't into the projects from the get-go. In the case of White House Down I get the feeling that Olympus Has Fallen—which will gross more despite having no real star power and half the budget—stole much of its thunder. And in the case of The Lone Ranger, I think audiences just weren't interested in Pirates of the Caribbean: Desert Follies. Politics doesn't seem to have entered into it.

One final note: It's interesting that Smith ignored Star Trek Into Darkness, which has grossed $224M domestically despite its ham-handed and confused** commentary on the moral awfulness of drone strikes. While it's worth noting that the sequel will fail to outgross*** its predecessor—which was light on politics and heavy on action—it is far from a flop.

*A semi-insidery note: the opening weekend (i.e., Friday, Saturday, Sunday) for The Lone Ranger was less important than its five-day July 4 "weekend" total. Doesn't really make a difference; it got crushed in both.

**How ham-handed and confused? So ham-handed and confused that one could plausibly (if sarcastically) argue that the esoteric reading of the film suggests it is secretly pro-drone-strike.

***Domestically, I mean: its worldwide totals have already surpassed Star Trek's.

Published under: Movies