Well, since the shock of finding out on Friday that Expelled was going to be fouling up my country with its ridiculous nonsense, the weekend numbers on its performance here have come in. Box office figures for Canada are often lumped in with those of the US so finding good information is hard, but the best number I have states that Expelled pulled in $24,374 across Canada for the whole weekend.

Sorry, I just have to take a minute. Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! I mean, what a shame.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any official numbers which break down the gross per theatre or even how many theatres are showing the damn thing. So, I did some ball-parking on my own. Here’s a haphazard list of major cities in Canada (the provincial capitals with Vancouver, Calgary, and Ottawa thrown in) and the number of theatres showing Expelled, culled from online movie listings:

Vancouver: 5

Victoria: 1

Edmonton: 1

Calgary: 2

Regina: 1

Winnipeg: 1

Toronto: 10

Ottawa: 2

Montréal: 1

Québec City: 0

Fredericton: 0

Charlottetown: 0

Halifax: 2

St. John’s: 1

That makes 27 theatres playing the movie (at least) in Canada. There are at least three showings at every theatre (a couple have only two showings, but the average is well above three so I’m estimating conservatively here). So for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, we have 27 * 3 * 3 or 243 showings of the movie. That would make for just over $100 per showing. Average ticket price is somewhere around $10 per ticket , so we have about 10 people per theater per showing. That’s pretty pathetic for the “big opening weekend”. And my estimate is undoubtably conservative, since all ten theatres showing the movie in Toronto are showing it at least 4 and sometimes 5 times per day, as are several of the other markets.

Let’s get this straight: they didn’t just plunk this turd down in one or two theatres up here in the Great White North. No, they opened in almost every major Canadian city and the resulting numbers show that they failed miserably. I would pretend to be sympathetic, but I’m not. Ben Stein is a lying jackass, and frankly I’m happy that his movie is tanking. Again.

Wait! There’s more!

Following up, I took a look at the Expelled website. There’s a theatre locator which I paged through to get a theatre total. Something is clearly whacky, because their locator only lists 4 theatres playing the movie in Vancouver where I count 5 (for some reason they left out Burnaby entirely), but putting that aside their total is still higher than mine at 36. 36 movie theatres, at an average of three showings per day for three days would make for 324 total showings, or no more than $24,374 / 324 = $75 per theatre, or about 7-8 people per showing. Again, a conservatively high estimate.

This, despite the “group release” extravaganzas available from the Expelled distributors! Wow, I can’t imagine why people haven’t been snapping up those opportunities.

You may think that I’m being snarky here, and you’d be right. Ben Stein is an IDiot, and he doesn’t deserve any attention that rises above the level of pure mocking. So I refuse to do more than laugh at this tool who thinks that science makes murders and that evolution caused the Holocaust, while engaging in some wholesome schadenfreude. Join me, won’t you?

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