This weekend a number of films debuted in theaters including Ben Affleck’s critically revered political thriller Argo, the broad comedy from Kevin James Here Comes the Boom, the clever horror flick Sinister, and Martin McDonagh’s zany crime comedy Seven Psychopaths, starring Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell and Colin Farrell. By most accounts, that would prove to be a great variety of films appealing to many different parts of the movie-going public. However, if you lean a bit more to the right than the left in your politics, you may have noticed one relatively big film omitted from that list: Atlas Shrugged: Part II. Did you know it came out this weekend? Probably not considering it had virtually no ad campaigns, no press screenings (which means virtually no coverage in newspapers, blogs and magazines), and thus no publicity.

Pundit conspiracy theories aside, the inability for a film, one espousing a viewpoint that the political party representing roughly half of the country’s population is founded on, to find equal footing in American theaters suggests a number of different things about the political climate within the entertainment world. But the truth is that a Conservative film can succeed, it just has to deliver what it promises.

It’s no mystery that Hollywood historically and primarily votes Democrat in decades past, with actors and directors recently using their fame as a pulpit for political evangelism, but that doesn’t change one basic fact: half of this country’s population still identifies themselves as Republican and, more importantly, conservative. Now, exactly how prevalent the liberal bias reigns in modern film and television has a lot to do with how much social clout you ascribe to pop culture. If you believe it has the potential to sway minds and hearts if broadcast into homes and released into theaters on a weekly basis, then you’re likely to see shows like The New Normal, The West Wing, The Newsroom, or films like Gayby as an assault on your belief system. It’s programming in line with the political beliefs of one half of society’s viewpoints on civics.

So where’s the representation of the other half?

Finding a sitcom or drama with a message that reinforces a disapproval of homosexuality or with a firm stance as pro-life is all but impossible, especially if you’re looking on network or cable television. It’s slim pickings, if any pickings at all. The one exception is in channels like Hallmark which typically has a pretty conservative bent to its made-for-TV movies, or Fox News which, while lacking for narrative fiction, spouts conservative and Republican rhetoric on a minute-by-minute basis.. The rationale behind it is that it’s a counterculture balance for “mainstream media” which arguably does have a liberal bias. The retort that “reality has a liberal bias” has been lobbied comically in response, but it doesn’t distract from the main point: what programming exists for the half of the country that identifies as conservative.

On average, most films that hit theaters don’t have a particular political angle, but when they do it’s probably liberal and chances are it enjoys a release schedule on par with any slightly wider release independent film. An Inconvenient Truth, for example, enjoyed a roughly 600-screen roll-out. That’s about as politically straightforward a film as you can find: it’s not even really a film; it’s just a slideshow with Al Gore walking us through it. If a film that politicized can gross about $50 million at the box office internationally, it suggests that a politically-minded film can still make substantial cash even with a limited opening.

This idea rings true with the recent success of the very conservative documentary 2016 Obama’s America which managed to gross $33 million and which was targeted at the anti-Obama base with the Republican Party. Again, it’s a very specific and partisan viewpoint (like An Inconvenient Truth), but because it had press, a respectable share of theaters (2,017) and an interested target audience, it managed to make a profit. It suggests that a conservatively motivated film can easily find a place in American cinema audiences’ viewing schedules.

So where did the first part of Atlas Shrugged go wrong? Is it as simple as going against the grain and being deprived of badly needed press?

As a continuation of the three-part adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, considered a kind of political bible of the Republican platform for its views on objectivism and self-reliance, Atlas Shrugged: Part II had a rough road ahead of it when it came to getting made. Budgeted for $20 million, the first part made about $4.6 million at the box office which made the prospect of a follow-up a grim proposal, and, had it been made within the larger studio system, an instant no-go. Luckily, its backers were quite invested in the project and moved forward anyway, but did so with a whole new director and cast in place (whether this was done in an attempt to improve quality or cut costs is not entirely clear – likely both). With the second part completed, the newly made distributor found about 1,000 screens where it could make its debut. And yet, for all those screens and the millions spent, it’s probable you never even saw an ad for the film.

Because if you saw an ad for the film, the odds are you were watching Fox News. The ads did air elsewhere, but nowhere as heavily as they did there. At first, that seems like a brilliant ad strategy: market a film that will resonate with the Republican base at a place that historically caters to the Republican viewpoint in politics. Unfortunately, even as “America’s most watched news source”, Fox News caters to a very specific and combative niche of the Republican Party, and not the broader base. So while it may be aimed at the right audience, by no means does it reach the amount needed to earn back a $20 million project to the point of profit.

Assuming half of America leans Republican, or at the very least conservative, the adaptation of a well-known story like Atlas Shrugged should have done reasonably well. It didn’t. While it would be easy to point the fingers at critics who lambasted the original for its muddled handling of Rand’s words and the cardboard acting, the truth is that the quality of film matters, especially if you represent it to the world as a sweeping philosophic epic. If you’re going to do something large and impactful, you have to do it right, otherwise you may as well do it small. An Inconvenient Truth might not have much of a plot, but it delivered on what it promised: a condensed presentation of facts arguing in defense of global climate change.

With the promises of a grandiose tale of self-reliance and industry, you have to ask: was slashing the budget and bringing in a new director and cast really the right way to go? If you don’t improve a film series’ ability to convey the ideas behind the larger story (which is really nothing but a flimsy frame for those ideas anyway), then you’re not really solving the problem.

At the time of publication, Atlas Shrugged: Part II has 10 reviews on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes and not a single one of them is positive. The film’s creators predicted this however, blaming it on their liberal bias, and thus didn’t release it for review for the press. Therefore, all of those reviews come from critics who sought the film out anyway and gave the world their thoughts on how it handled Ayn Rand’s novel. Yet the driving force behind the thrust of each review’s criticism is not because the film espouses Ayn Rand’s views. Obviously they went in knowing that would be the entire point of the narrative. The criticism comes instead as an outcry against the film’s inability to pass Rand’s thoughts in a comprehensible and impactful manner thanks to poor writing and acting, only one of which evidently improved from the first film (the acting).

The success of 2016 Obama’s America suggests there’s very much an audience for films that follow the line of thinking touted by today’s Republican Party, but the lackluster welcome of both Atlas Shrugged films suggests their producers can’t figure out how to do it in a way that appeals to its target audience. If these were truly films they wanted to see, we’d be looking at blockbuster numbers very different from the fizzling out Atlas Shrugged: Part II delivered at the box office this weekend. Despite having more than twice as many screens as the first film, the second part of the trilogy only debuted to a $22,000 improvement in its opening weekend haul (so far). Twice as many screens for only a 12% increase in box office, might be the clincher to convince its producers that it’s genuinely doing something wrong in its attempts to bring one of the most celebrated books of conservative thinking to life.

Because a conservative film can succeed when it has the right elements, and when it doesn’t, it ends up just another Atlas Shrugged or An American Carol.