Bomb, Bay

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog has a good read on this past weekend's opening of director Michael Bay's instant- not- classic "13 Hours", a film about the Benghazi tragedy (more specifically the shoot- 'em- up, blow- 'em- up parts) that right- wingers are desperate to make all about the perfidy of Hillary Clinton and President Obama.  Steve notes that the movie was Bay's worst opening in a decade, and might fail to break even (it tallied a disappointing $16 million and finished fourth in the weekend box office charts).  This, despite heavy flogging by Republicans and a ubiquitous advertising campaign by Paramount Studios.  Here's the once great Washington Post's Bezos Bugle's Ann Hornaday on the Paramount effort to sell the film as innocent, hero- worshiping fun:

... Paramount has insisted that the film is “not political.” That’s a whopper, even for an industry that has so brilliantly perfected the art of relieving itself on consumers and telling them that it’s raining.

What Paramount only pretends not to have known all along is that, of course, “13 Hours” is political, even if it isn’t explicitly partisan. Despite its dog-whistle marketing, the content of the film might disappoint the most rabid Hillary haters. Secretary Clinton is never invoked by name in the film, and the president is only mentioned in passing, when a character says that “POTUS has been briefed.” Rather than a red-meat attack on the Obama administration, “13 Hours” engages in a kind of diffuse, all-purpose cynicism about Washington as a familiar metonym for incompetence, corruption and bureaucratic inertia.  [snip]

“It feels like it was hard for people to buy a ticket if they were more liberal leaning,” Rob Moore, Paramount’s vice-chairman, told Variety on Sunday. “It’s sad that this gets turned into a political debate as opposed to a conversation about who did the right thing and who was heroic.”

Of course, that’s what happens when you court a narrow market for your movies: The audiences you neglect don’t come...

The disingenuous Mr. Moore knew perfectly well this subject was a "political debate" (and soon, a failed Republican talking point) from the second the film was green lighted.  (He's a "devout Christian" who brought the Biblical epic "Noah" to the silver screen in 2014.  We suspect we know what his political leanings are.)  His company just made a very bad business decision thinking it could ride a wave of misdirected wingnut rage into box office gold. 

Finally, we couldn't help but notice in Steve's read where he quotes Gawker's Christopher Hooks' accounts of certain "13 Hours" film goers, including this psychopath:

... “Oh yeah. I’d shoot Hillary Clinton in the fuckin’ head. I don’t like the bitch at all,” said Len Toomey, who identified himself as a veteran of Desert Storm and Somalia. He’d seen the movie with some VFW friends. “Choke her. She should be in the pisser and I should be pissin’ on her every night.”

Let's hope the U.S. Secret Service pays this jamoke a visit soon.