Creation vs. Expelled

Darwin biopic Creation premiered in seven movie theaters across the country last weekend, earning $53,073, an average of $7,582. That's not a lot of money, but at roughly $10/ticket, this works out to 760 viewers per theater, a solid showing. I know the theater I saw it at was full for their 7 pm showing.

Compare that to creationist schlockumentary Expelled: No Intelligenceâ¦, released two springs ago. Part of its promotional strategy was a big opening weekend; coordinating with the owners of Regal movie theaters, they opened in 1,052 theaters, earning $2,970,848, or $2,824 per theater (roughly 280 viewers).

By my math, Creation did more than 3 times better than Expelled, and with a much smaller promotional budget. Which makes sense: it's a much better movie.

More like this

I didn't get to see Bill Maher's Religulous, but apparently a lot of people did. It was on 502 theaters, and earned $3,500,000. For those keeping track, Ben Stein's Expelled earned $2,970,848 on its opening weekend, and was showing on 1,052 theaters. In other words, it earned less money despite…
It's Monday morning, three days after the opening of the creationist propaganda piece Expelled, and everyone seems to be talking about whether the film can be considered to be a success or not. Wing Nut Daily says that it was a resounding success (despite coming in at #8), while many of my fellow…
Chris Mooney, who every day seems to transmogrify more and more into a creationist apologist, makes the case that Expelled! is a box office success. He seems almost giddy about it in his post on the topic. I'm sure Chris will be blaming PZ Myers, me, the rest of us people for part of this. But…
As I've frequently said, statistics is an area which is poorly understood by most people, and as a result, it's an area which is commonly used to mislead people. The thing is, when you're working with statistics, it's easy to find a way of presenting some value computed from the data that will…

Your statement at the end makes me wonder how quickly people would dismiss your statement, since Expelled earned roughly 56 times more money during it's opening weekend than Creation. And as "everyone knows", $2.9 million is far better (i.e., more successful) than $0.053 million.

(Of course, these arguments completely fail to understand what a quotient represents.)