{"id":61484,"date":"2016-12-26T11:00:03","date_gmt":"2016-12-26T17:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=61484"},"modified":"2016-12-26T12:15:33","modified_gmt":"2016-12-26T18:15:33","slug":"get-the-sad-trombone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=61484","title":{"rendered":"Get The Sad Trombone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gun-control melodrama\u00a0Miss Sloane\u00a0<\/em>has bombed at the box office<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Well, no. \u00a0That understates it. \u00a0Howard the Duck\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Ishtar<\/em> bombed. \u00a0Miss Sloane\u00a0<\/em>was dropped from a single B-29, and like that iconic single bomb, has a decent shot at helping to bring a war to an end.<\/p>\n

After lavish television advertising –\u00a0Miss Sloane\u00a0<\/em>had a bigger TV budget than the inescapable\u00a0Rogue One<\/em> – and fawning reviews from liberal critics and media, the movie earned $3.2 million dollars. \u00a0Which, divided by the number of screens and a $10 ticket price, meant an average of around ten people attending each showing.<\/p>\n

And it wasn\u2019t for lack of trying to get people to show up. Out of the 200 highest-grossing movies of 2016, only ten exceeded the $15.9 million television advertising budget of Miss Sloane, and seven of those did so by very small amounts. Miss Sloane spent more than the Star Wars spinoff Rogue One, Star Trek, Pete\u2019s Dragon, Arrival, Doctor Strange, and Hacksaw Ridge. It had twice the advertising budget of such hits as Sully, The Girl on the Train, and The Secret Life of Pets. For every dollar spent on advertising, Miss Sloane brought in just 21 cents in ticket sales. By this measure, it came in dead last out of the 200 top-grossing movies in 2016. No one else was even close. Coming in second-to-last was Collateral Beauty, which made 53\u00a0cents per advertising dollar. The average movie made almost $2 for each dollar spent on advertising.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, the movie’s core conceit – that gun grabbers are a bunch of plucky, underfunded underdogs, duking it out with a “gun lobby” that is floating in money – is a preposterous fiction. \u00a0Michael Bloomberg and other anti-gun plutocrats fund the “safe criminal” movement lavishly.<\/p>\n

For example, here in Minnesota during the 2016 campaign, groups affiliated with the safe criminal lobby spent well over a million dollars – easily ten times as much as the Human Rights movement did – and employed at least four full-time paid staffers. \u00a0 Not a single person in Minnesota is paid to lobby the legislature or organize the community; the movement is\u00a0entirely volunteers<\/em>, working on their own time out of pure devotion to the Bill of Rights. \u00a0 In other states – Nevada, Washington, Maine – the spending ratio was closer to 30 to 1.<\/p>\n

I suspect most Americans can tell the movie doesn’t pass the stink test; \u00a0Sloane’s\u00a0<\/em>premise reeks like a full pea-soup diaper on a dog day in the bayou.<\/p>\n

And its failure is of a piece with the collapse, over the past fifteen years, of nearly every single Hollywood anti-war movie.<\/p>\n

When I saw the trailer – during one of my ever-so-brief episodes of watching broadcast TV – I heard the trailer in the background. \u00a0I think it was the normally-excellent Sam Waterson, playing one of the “gun lobby” bad guys. \u00a0I think I envisioned a character wearing a black cape and top hat, twisting a painstakingly-maintained handlebar mustache as he tied Ms. Chastain…er, Sloane to the tracks. \u00a0I actually laughed out loud.<\/p>\n

But hey, Hollywood; keep ’em coming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gun-control melodrama\u00a0Miss Sloane\u00a0has bombed at the box office. Well, no. \u00a0That understates it. \u00a0Howard the Duck\u00a0and\u00a0Ishtar bombed. \u00a0Miss Sloane\u00a0was dropped from a single B-29, and like that iconic single bomb, has a decent shot at helping to bring a war to an end. After lavish television advertising –\u00a0Miss Sloane\u00a0had a bigger TV budget than the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[325,30,51,255,349,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-gun-control","category-liberty","category-liberal-tyranny","category-the-racket","category-urban-liberal-privilege-liberal-tyranny","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61484"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61528,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61484\/revisions\/61528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}