Inconvenient Truth Box Office

I hope this next thing I'm going to write about isn't crass, and I do apologize in advance if it is, but maybe it's the business student in me, not sure, that for some reason started wondering about the economics of Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim's movie and how it faired.

That movie, of course, would be Inconvenient Truth. Net Impact Hanken organized a showing of this film in the fall.

Perhaps it just feels like #1, one would want to see a movie like that be successful (seriously, if Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous grosses over a $100 million, then Inconvenient Truth should at least come close -- what's good though is that Miss Congeniality starred Sandra Bullock and from what I recall of having read entertainment news recently, she is known in Hollywood as a very generous philantropist. Anyway.)

More importantly, #2, box office success of a climate documentary would be a good guesstimate for how successfully its message got delivered to a wider audience.

So with that being said...

It's just good to know, somehow, that the film did exceptionally well in terms of box office, having grossed approximately $42 million since its late May release in 2006. That is a lot for a documentary, especially one that deals with a relatively technical subject like climate change. Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim's success really lay in giving climate change a face -- personalizing a concept and a phenomenon.

If we assume an average ticket price of $10, that would mean over four million viewers actually valued the message enough to commit both time and hard-earned money to see the movie. What's more, there were free public showings so that figure probably understates the actual number of viewers reached.

Looking forward to a lot more stuff like this from the (American) film industry.