Al Gore's new documentary film appears to be a box-office flop, the latest evidence that the movie-going public has moved on from the issue – global warming – that has made him uber wealthy.
While reviewers for the New York Times and other establishment publications are raving about the new documentary – "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power" – the ticket-buying public is responding with a collective yawn. The film placed 15th in the rankings of dollars spent on movies last weekend.
The poor box-office showing prompted one reviewer for the Washington Examiner to muse "Will Al Gore call for a recount?"
There's no denying that Gore's 2006 Oscar-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth," was a huge box-office success, generating more than $50 million in revenues.
TRENDING: To DEI for
But the sequel has grossed only about $1 million in its first two weeks.
"Of the estimated $121 million Americans spent at the movies last weekend, less than $1 million was spent on Gore's sad grab at political relevancy. Perhaps Gore can take solace in the fact that he narrowly edged out for 15th place another liberal-biased movie, 'Cars 3,' which targets children with fossil fuel lies via cute talking cars," noted Joseph Bast, chief executive of the Heartland Institute, in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner. "No word yet on whether Gore is going to demand a recount."
Some reviewers blamed Paramount's marketing strategy of not releasing the film nationwide in its first week.
But that's no excuse for poor performance. "Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party," a documentary by conservative firebrand Dinesh D'Souza, was initially released in only three theaters and has raked in $3 million in its first couple of weeks.
"Despite tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in free promotion offered by the left-wing media for Gore, Americans didn't take heed," wrote Bast. "And after eight straight miserable years of the Obama administration misusing its control of government bureaucracies and schools, assisted every step of the way by the government-aligned left-wing media, the purveyors of climate doom thought they had won the battle of public opinion."
Surveys and independent reviews of the peer-reviewed literature show Gore has not won the battle of so-called "scientific consensus," says Bast.
"No matter how many scientists believed the Earth was flat in the 1500s, or warned in the 1970s an approaching an Ice Age, or announced that the 'Piltdown Chicken' proved birds evolved from dinosaurs, it didn't change the facts," he writes. "The Earth is round, the chicken was a hoax, and we aren't in a dangerous Ice Age yet."
Despite the millions Gore has made off of his first documentary, almost all of the film's dire predictions have failed to come to pass.
He predicted catastrophic Antarctic and Greenlandic ice melts and rising sea levels engulfing millions.
"Instead, Antarctic ice has increased, and Gore even bought a beachfront mansion to prove he didn't believe it either," Bast writes.
"Gore also claimed that man-caused global warming would result in more catastrophic hurricanes and tornadoes – but every day that passes sets a new record for a major hurricane failing to strike the U.S. Tornado activity has actually declined since its recent peak in the 1970s, despite the improved ability to find, track, and measure tornadoes.
"Gore also said in his first movie in 2006 that Mount Kilimanjaro would be free of snow on its peak by 'the end of the decade.' Guess what? That didn't happen either."
Nor did his prediction that the Arctic would be ice-free by the summer of 2014.
"Polar bears didn't get his memo that they are dying off – drowning, as illustrated in the movie by a lonely cartoon polar bear swimming in an Arctic Ocean with no ice floes upon which to rest and hunt. The polar bear population today is larger and healthier that is has been at any time in the last 50 years."