It was going to be the Religious Right's answer to Michael Moore. It was going to be a blockbuster that blew open a whole new front in the culture wars, and not so incidentally made the producers a hefty stack of cash in the process. Take that, liberals!
And then it just went pop like a soap bubble.
No riots, no fighting in the streets, no angry mobs with torches, and -- worst of all -- no profit.
At the close of its fourth weekend, down to about a third of the screens it was released on, the total box office for "Expelled" has just inched over the $7M mark. Given a production budget of $3.5M and a publicity budget described by the producers as "multiples" of that, we're probably talking about at least $11.5M at bare minimum to make and market the thing, including the literally million-dollar expense of making over a thousand prints for such a wide release.
In other words, our friends the creationists have, despite all their attempts to rally their own troops, taken a multi-million dollar bath.
Isn't that nice?
So that naturally brings up the question, "Who killed 'Expelled'?" Was it the nefarious nabobs of Big Science and the Librul Media? Or was it you? Read on.