This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In a slow week at the box office, a Salt Lake City distributor provided the one surprise on the chart — with a "documentary" bashing President Barack Obama.
The right-wing doc "2016: Obama's America" expanded to more than 1,000 theaters this weekend, taking in a surprising $6.2 million over the weekend, the Los Angeles Times reported. That put the movie in eighth place on the weekend chart, just behind the underperforming debut of the Joseph Gordon-Levitt chase movie "Premium Rush."
The movie is co-directed and narrated by right-wing author Dinesh D'Souza, who argues that Obama is an "anti-colonialist" who wants to see America "downsized." Among the movie's producers is Gerald Molen, whose credits include "Schindler's List" and the LDS missionary tale "The Other Side of Heaven."
The movie was invisible in most media — with no reviews or general coverage — but was advertised heavily on talk-radio and Fox News. The movie has been trickling into theaters since mid-July, with the wide release timed to coincide with the Republican National Convention this week.
That kind of exposure brought in a strong Friday audience; the movie ranked fourth for the day, The Hollywood Reporter reported. But the movie couldn't sustain such crowds for the entire weekend.
The movie's distributor, Salt Lake City-based Rocky Mountain Pictures, bills itself as a "distributor for hire." But the company has a penchant for conservative-themed movies, having released the Ben Stein anti-Darwin screed "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" and last year's Ayn Rand adaptation "Atlas Shrugged, Part I."