I love keeping up with weekend box office numbers. I play the box office challenge on www.ez1productions.com and read the weekend warrior from comingsoon.net. I believe we can learn from the box office trends and this 2012 recap of box office winners and losers from www.boxofficemojo.com reveals something positive related to politics we can look forward to.
Political movies tend not to perform well at the box office and, with the presidential election dominating headlines, it would have been easy to expect that to be the case again this year. Instead, movies with a political tie-in found tons of success in 2012.
The greatest example is Lincoln, which opened in nationwide release less than two weeks after the presidential election; by the end of the year, it has racked up a remarkable $134.2 million, and it still has plenty of money left to earn. Argo wasn't quite as political as Lincoln—the context of the Iranian Hostage Crisis was secondary to the espionage thrills—though its $108.7 million gross in 2012 is still remarkable for a movie with such heavy real-world subject matter.
On the lighter end, Will Ferrell-Zach Galifianakis comedy The Campaign quietly wound up being one of the biggest comedy hits of the year with $86.9 million. Finally, 2016 Obama's America became the second-highest-grossing political documentary ever with $33.5 million.
The Internet and social media in particular allows us to grasp so much unfiltered information. I think the interest movie goers gave these political movies in 2012 represent the growing participation in politics that people didn't have during the last election.
Hopefully the interest keeps growing so that even more people go out and vote in 2016.
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