The Undefeated debuted on 10 screens this weekend. How’d it do? According to the Hollywood Reporter it grossed “$60,000 to $75,000.” So was the film a flop? We can’t say that. This total’s comparable to the $101,000 haul Errol Morris got for his new documentary, Tabloid, which played on 14 screens, and comparable to the $142,000 that the new documentary about A Tribe Called Quest made on 22 screens.
So: Not a sensation, not a flop. Director Steve Bannon tells me “we put no media spend in this,” that the team had “three weeks to prep instead of four months,” and that the distributer “will do a targeted roll-out starting this week.” The roll-out, from what I gather from blog chatter and the frequent status updates from the film’s distributor, is going to look a lot like the selling of Atlas Shrugged. Make the movie a cause; get Palin fans ginned up to watch it in order to send a message. If you calculate the time that bloggers spent trying to debunk Conor Friedersdorf’s report about an empty midnight screening, you’ll be bullish on the promoters’ chances.
