‘2016 Obama’s America’ is most successful conservative documentary of all time, taking in $9m
You can tell it’s election year in the USA, as a documentary that is effectively little more than a sideswipe at President Barack Obama has taken an astonishing $9m in its seven weeks in US cinemas.
Dinesh D’Souza and John Sullivan’s film ‘2016: Obama’s America’ claims that Obama’s views are clouded by the anti-colonialist beliefs of his Kenyan father and that the President is out to weaken America’s place in the world. The figures are all the more surprising as the movie is only just beginning to gain traction, upping the number of cinemas it’s playing in from 169 to 1,075 next week.
The movie has received much promotion on conservative talk radio shows and Fox News, and is based on D’Souza’s 2010 bestseller ‘The Roots Of Obama’s Rage’.
Sullivan told The Hollywood Reporter: “I think the reason why the film is doing so well is threefold: We’ve expanded into good markets, we’ve been advertising nationally for two weeks on talk radio and television news channels including Fox News Channel, A&E, History and MSNBC.”
‘2016’ accuses Obama of not buying into the myth of American exceptionalism, and of wanting to reshape the country along different lines. It is a broadside that may be baffling to non-Americans but is a potent cocktail in a year when some Republicans are accusing the president of, amongst other things, being un-American, a muslim and a socialist (a dirty word in the states).
The film’s success will probably not worry the unflappable prez however, after all in 2004 Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11 was a runaway success, and as we all know George W. Bush received another four years in the White House.