Time for some honest reassessment
I've been watching this project from the beginning to the end, and I wanted to give some final thoughts now that the last curtain is down, and Part III -- Galt speech and all -- is going to top out at somewhere around a million dollars.
I don't think anyone can argue that the project was a financial success. Netflix and DVD are not going to help more than a little, because that money mostly goes to other parts of the channel rather than the filmmakers.
Before Part I came out, John Aglialoro was talking about what he'd do once the ticket sales of Part I went past $100,000,000, how those massive profits would finance the next two films, and how he'd handle film festivals like Cannes. But now we know that the entire trilogy won't get to $10,000,000 put together. The project ends very deep in the red.
What went wrong?
You can have a blame-fest: the critics are idiots, the public is idiotic, they didn't deserve such a masterpiece, it's a liberal conspiracy, the media turned on it because it scares the left.
But if you look honestly, you have to see that if anything, the trilogy doesn't scare the left but reassures it: they now see that Ayn Rand's best pitch -- the Galt speech, that centerpiece of objectivism -- in movie form is going to end up crawling across the million-dollar line on hands and knees on its last breath.
Now, the hard question, but the honest one: what part of the blame falls onto the movie makers themselves? Is it absolutely none? Not a molecule? They did everything perfectly well and this disaster was in no way self-inflicted? Or is blaming liberals and moochers just a cheap way of blocking off a good hard self-analysis?
With the clock ticking, John Aglialoro took a big gamble, with the built-in assumption that he could adopt an entirely new role -- movie producer -- entirely outside his realm of experience, and not only carry it off, but carry it off well.
What we learned was that he could indeed make a trilogy based on "Atlas Shrugged." He could carry that ball all the way to the finish line, creating a trilogy which is, outside a very small collection of true believers, regarded as a very bad one.
Isn't it worth considering the possibility that the movies did poorly, not because they were Rand, but because they were poorly made by someone new to the business who bit off more than he could chew?
Rand was able to mix her ideology with a forward-moving plot; plotting was arguably her best skill as a writer of fiction. But the movies, whenever there was a choice between making the plot exciting versus hammering the ideology, always chose the latter. Aglialoro made it clear that the one thing he valued most was not artistic vision, coherence of plot to the viewer unfamiliar with Rand, or even entertainment, but the hammering of the ideology.
What better example than the disappearance of Reardon? It's one of the centerpieces of the plot, one of the key pieces. Is anyone anywhere actually satisfied by how Rearden was handled? Screen time that could have been used to bring that important plot thread to a real, satisfying conclusion -- nope, not as important as the ideology.
The movie theater can be a wonderful classroom. But if it's only a classroom, without any kind of entertainment value along with the instruction, people won't attend. It could have been possible to make the trilogy both entertaining and instructional. But the consensus -- among liberals, conservatives, and most especially the box office -- is that these movies simply failed as entertainment. The fan base, who already knew the plot, might have liked it, but the newbie was left flailing helplessly trying to follow a plot that wasn't explicated in the films.
That left the film as a niche product playing only to its base. Aglialoro initially said that he was thrilled at how this would bring Ayn Rand into the mass consciousness to a degree she had never been before. But to the degree it has, it is as a figure of fun: she's the author of the book that was turned into that really terrible trilogy, the one where the cast kept changing and the production values got cheaper and cheaper.
To try and fail is better than not trying at all. But sometimes discretion is the better form of valor. Sometimes you bite off more than you can chew. And that is how this trilogy will be remembered.
I don't think anyone can argue that the project was a financial success. Netflix and DVD are not going to help more than a little, because that money mostly goes to other parts of the channel rather than the filmmakers.
Before Part I came out, John Aglialoro was talking about what he'd do once the ticket sales of Part I went past $100,000,000, how those massive profits would finance the next two films, and how he'd handle film festivals like Cannes. But now we know that the entire trilogy won't get to $10,000,000 put together. The project ends very deep in the red.
What went wrong?
You can have a blame-fest: the critics are idiots, the public is idiotic, they didn't deserve such a masterpiece, it's a liberal conspiracy, the media turned on it because it scares the left.
But if you look honestly, you have to see that if anything, the trilogy doesn't scare the left but reassures it: they now see that Ayn Rand's best pitch -- the Galt speech, that centerpiece of objectivism -- in movie form is going to end up crawling across the million-dollar line on hands and knees on its last breath.
Now, the hard question, but the honest one: what part of the blame falls onto the movie makers themselves? Is it absolutely none? Not a molecule? They did everything perfectly well and this disaster was in no way self-inflicted? Or is blaming liberals and moochers just a cheap way of blocking off a good hard self-analysis?
With the clock ticking, John Aglialoro took a big gamble, with the built-in assumption that he could adopt an entirely new role -- movie producer -- entirely outside his realm of experience, and not only carry it off, but carry it off well.
What we learned was that he could indeed make a trilogy based on "Atlas Shrugged." He could carry that ball all the way to the finish line, creating a trilogy which is, outside a very small collection of true believers, regarded as a very bad one.
Isn't it worth considering the possibility that the movies did poorly, not because they were Rand, but because they were poorly made by someone new to the business who bit off more than he could chew?
Rand was able to mix her ideology with a forward-moving plot; plotting was arguably her best skill as a writer of fiction. But the movies, whenever there was a choice between making the plot exciting versus hammering the ideology, always chose the latter. Aglialoro made it clear that the one thing he valued most was not artistic vision, coherence of plot to the viewer unfamiliar with Rand, or even entertainment, but the hammering of the ideology.
What better example than the disappearance of Reardon? It's one of the centerpieces of the plot, one of the key pieces. Is anyone anywhere actually satisfied by how Rearden was handled? Screen time that could have been used to bring that important plot thread to a real, satisfying conclusion -- nope, not as important as the ideology.
The movie theater can be a wonderful classroom. But if it's only a classroom, without any kind of entertainment value along with the instruction, people won't attend. It could have been possible to make the trilogy both entertaining and instructional. But the consensus -- among liberals, conservatives, and most especially the box office -- is that these movies simply failed as entertainment. The fan base, who already knew the plot, might have liked it, but the newbie was left flailing helplessly trying to follow a plot that wasn't explicated in the films.
That left the film as a niche product playing only to its base. Aglialoro initially said that he was thrilled at how this would bring Ayn Rand into the mass consciousness to a degree she had never been before. But to the degree it has, it is as a figure of fun: she's the author of the book that was turned into that really terrible trilogy, the one where the cast kept changing and the production values got cheaper and cheaper.
To try and fail is better than not trying at all. But sometimes discretion is the better form of valor. Sometimes you bite off more than you can chew. And that is how this trilogy will be remembered.
The film cycle is over, and it ended in ignominious disaster. There's nothing left but the inevitable fire sale on the merchandise.
But some of the folks here are in outright denial. They have drunk, not the Rand Koolaid but the Aglialoro Koolaid, the stuff that makes you believe the trilogy was not generally a laughingstock. The trilogy might have "brought thousands" to the Rand gospel, but it showed millions -- anyone with access to Google, in fact, that "Atlas Shrugged" makes truly terrible movies.
In what sense could that be considered a win? My doubts for the series didn't suddenly begin when part 3 crashed and burned. The way Part I was rushed last-minute into production was very troubling, the constant recasting was tremendously offputting, and the ever-shrinking budget ended the series not with a bang but with a whimper, one matched by a whimper at the box office.
But again, I'm writing on a sort of mournful day, in the sense that the series closes today, nowhere within lightyears of profit, and regarded among most objectivists as as best "at least he tried," the prhase you get with th consolation prize. "Atlas Shrugged" is now a demonstrated three-time loser in the theater, and nobody is going to try again in the next twenty years.
Yet the truest of the true will insist everything went very well, and will, rather than consider the alternative, simply try to drive off anyone who suggests otherwise. That, folks, is called denial, and it's one of the stages of grief.
In the meantime, the figures are in. The last theatrical showings of the trilogy are tonight, and by my calculation the project closes at least $20 million in the hole.
I also can't help notice that you seem to think every account on this site is an active account. Is that the same standard you're holding other objectivist sites to, or are you stacking the deck again?
That is, are you lying to me, or are you lying to yourself?
What's more, it will be interesting to see how quickly this site fades once the movie news dries up.
The only criticisms repeatedly expressed seem to be variations of the complaint that these movies aren't big budget mainstream hollywood productions.
Yes, they are not. So, don't drop context and expect big-hollywood whiz bang gimmicks and you may be able to appreciate them for the masterpieces that they actually are.
In my view these 3 movies are the most entertaining and enlightening movies ever made, and not just because the source material is brilliant. It's also because of a great job of faithfully adapting the story for the screen, great performances by the cast, great direction, great music, and even generally very high production values.
I was initially disappointed by the cast changing between the movies, but now I am glad for it. It gives us the opportunity to see different portrayals of the characters by different actors. I wouldn't have wanted to miss either of the 3 Dagnys, or either Hank or Francisco. I loved them all. And I love the fact that the characters are so strong that they come through consistently even though the actors keep changing.
I'm sure the movies will sell very well on DVD and Blu-Ray for decades and will introduce many millions of people to Atlas, many of whom will go on to read the book. And they will likely even earn back every penny spent on their production and will produce profits for the producers, though it will be over the long term. (The producers' motivation wasn't financial gain anyway).
The fact that they didn't do better at the box office is definitely a function of a number of factors mostly unrelated to the quality of the movies:
1. To begin with, they were independent productions with a very limited theatrical release
2. Universally panned by critics which was inevitable
3. Most people are just way too stupid to appreciate the ideas or the artistic grandeur of the story ( > 99% in my experience )
4. Trilogy format means each movie is nearly guaranteed to get only a subset of the viewers of the previous one, as most people will assume (correctly) that you need to have seen the previous parts.
Here's a thought experiment for you: can you name a movie you watched in the last 10 years that was more entertaining than the AS trilogy, and that you might want to re-watch as many times?
I can't think of any.
Nearly every movie I've seen in the last decade, big budget or small. My beef with the trilogy isn't that it's not a small-budget independent film; many of my favorites are. The problem is that the trilogy writes a check it can't cash in terms of intellectual depth. Rand's message is freeze-dried and shrinkwrapped into just another inch-deep tea party screed, while Rand was much more than that.
Your post verges on parody of true-believerdom. If there were a prize for moving the goal posts most, you'd be in consideration.