Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 set to burn up box office records

FAHRENHEIT 9/11, Michael Moore’s assault on US President George W Bush, is on track for an opening weekend that would surpass the $21.6 million (€17.7m) total gross of Mr Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, the 2002 film that earned him an Academy Award for best documentary.

Bowling for Columbine holds the record for highest US domestic gross among documentaries, excluding concert films and movies made for huge-screen IMAX theaters.

So far, the film has taken in about $8m (€6.5m) from cinemas across the US.

Fahrenheit 9/11 ran about $1.5m (€1.2m) ahead of its closest competitor, the Wayans brothers’ comedy White Chicks. The performance was even more remarkable considering it played in just 868 theaters, fewer than a third the number for White Chicks.

Mr Moore’s film benefited from a flurry of praise and condemnation. Supporters mobilised liberal-minded audiences to see it over its opening weekend to counter efforts by some right-wing groups to discredit the film.

“It always helps when there’s a group out there that says, ‘Don’t go see this movie. It’s bad for you’,” said Jonathan Sehring, president of IFC Films, one of the film’s distributors.

Fahrenheit 9/11 paints Mr Bush as a neglectful president who ignored terrorism warnings before September 11, then stirred up fear of more attacks to win public support for the Iraq war. The movie won the top honour at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The film has ridden a wave of publicity since before Cannes, when Mr Moore began assailing Disney for refusing to let subsidiary Miramax release it because of its political content. Miramax bosses Harvey and Bob Weinstein bought back the film and hooked up with Lions Gate Films and IFC to distribute it. The fury over Fahrenheit 9/11 resembled the firestorm created by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which rose to blockbuster status amid debate over whether it was anti-Semitic. “It’s like how ‘The Passion of the Christ’ redefined what a certain genre of movie could do at the box office. ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ is doing the same thing,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations. “This blows away any conceivable record for box office of a documentary.”