Tuesday, September 25, 2012

'2016: Obama's America' Filmmakers Claim Organized Disinformation Campaign

UPDATED: The movie showed up on YouTube over the weekend as rumors spread it would also be shown free on the Fox News Channel.


The filmmakers behind 2016: Obama’s America are claiming a coordinated attack engineered by supporters of Barack Obama to suppress the box-office results of the movie, which is a critical look at the president.

The film, the second-highest-grossing political documentary in U.S. box-office history, has made $32 million domestically since opening in mid July but took in only $938,000 during the recent weekend for a per-screen average of $771, down 27 percent from $1,060 per screen in the previous weekend, according to BoxOfficeMojo. Overall, the movie's boxoffice dropped 53 percent in the most recent weekend compared with the previous one, its largest decline since opening 10 weeks ago.

While such a drop isn't unusual for a movie during the course of a week -- especially when the theater count dropped from 1,876 to 1,216 -- filmmakers nevertheless say box-office results were artificially depressed for two reasons: a disinformation campaign spreading the false rumor that Fox News Channel would be showing the movie in its entirety Sunday and a pirated version of the film showing up on YouTube this weekend.

“Saturday morning, I started getting e-mails from groups and individuals either warning me about the piracy of 2016: Obama’s America or thanking me for allowing the movie to go online,” said Randy Slaughter, president of Rocky Mountain Pictures, the film’s distributor.

Filmmakers said they notified the FBI that the movie was available illegally and that they notified YouTube of a copyright breach, prompting the user to take down the film.

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