Frankly, I’d like to know what exactly the executives at the Walt Disney Corporation who approved The Alamo were thinking. The film, produced for about one hundred million dollars, managed to rake in just a pinch more then $9 million in its opening weekend. To give you an idea as to just how poor a performance this is, Fox’s The Girl Next Door, produced for about $20 million, managed to pull in over $6 million. This total, in general, is considered a disappointment. However, with those numbers, by the time everything is said and done (and the DVD release has been completed) I’d expect it to earn a modest profit whereas the Alamo, when all costs are considered, will probably lose something like $50 million. When you’re $100 million movie performs about as well as a poorly-reviewed sex comedy (and comes in behind two movies which were previously released) you know you must be doing something wrong.

The really stupid thing about it is that Disney must have known that this movie was going to tank. There have already been plenty of movies made about the Alamo. Why make another? Why not make a movie about some other battle? Because, of course, this version of The Alamo isn’t meant to be a patriotic romp or a traditional war movie, it’s meant to serve as a deconstructionist piece. Meaning, the main point of this movie is to try and shatter the legend which surrounds what happened at the Alamo and to remove the lustre from the heroes who fell there.

Surely whoever approved this movie must have known that such a film wouldn’t be able to draw in the crowds or to justify its budget. Why was it green-lighted then? The only reasons I can think of are ideological. Whoever approved it couldn’t miss a chance to slander some American heroes. I can think of no other rational explanation. This is especially true, I think, in light of the pre-release publicity which emphasised the revisionist approach the film too to history. I’m a regular movie-goer. I’ll typically see about four movies at the theatre in an average month. Sometimes I’ll see as many as six or so and I’m one of those desired customers who will pay to see a movie in the theatres more than once (I live within walking distance of a cheap, second-run theatre, though some I will see again at regular prices). Working from memory, so far this year, I’ve gone to see The Passion of the Christ, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and The Girl Next Door twice (the latter I saw in a preview screening about a month and a half ago). I’ve also see Jersey Girl, The Ladykillers, Eurotrip, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (love that exclamation mark), Dawn of the Dead, and Return of the King. I’m sure I’ve seen at least one or two others, but I can’t really recall which ones at the moment. In addition, I’m sure that I’ve gone to see pretty much every major war or historical film released in the last half dozen years.

I bring this up simply to note that I, as a regular consumer of Hollywood fare, am not the typical conservative who hasn’t seen a movie in fifteen years ranting about the excesses of Hollywood Babylon. Nor am I convinced that everything made there is trash. There have been some truly good movies made in the last few years. But that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t do better or that they haven’t made a number of consciously stupid decisions.

People have looked too much at the religious angle to explain the success of The Passion of the Christ. Certainly, it was heavily promoted by Churches and other religious groups. However, in my opinion, the key element of the marketing plan was advanced by the conservative media. Rush Limbaugh has twenty million listeners a week. If he tells them to go see a movie, and just one in five of them listen, that movie will sell at least $40 million tickets as a result (and more than that, when you consider that those people will then take along others). A lot of the success of The Passion can be attributed to just how heavily it was promoted by conservative columnists, talk show hosts, and commentators. A movie which heavily appealed to 10 million American conservatives enough to draw them into a movie theatre would make $100 million. Many of these people, I might add, probably don’t see much of Hollywood’s current crop of films.

Think about it for a second. Last year CBS spent a lot of money to make its telefilm The Reagans that caused so much trouble. The reason they did it the way they did was obvious to me: to bash Ronald Reagan. Given the number of people who angrily responded to an anti-Reagan film, just how do you think people would respond to a well-made pro-Reagan film?

Imagine this for a second. Peter Schweizer’s Reagan’s War, an excellent recent book on the 40th President, is optioned and made into a film. It tells the story of Ronald Reagan from that moment he stepped onto the stage to make his national speech in support of Barry Goldwater in 1964 (not where the book actually begins, but the perfect moment to pick up the story in my opinion) and ends with him triumphantly leaving the White House in 1989 (or with the public revelation of his illness in 1994). The movie is modestly well-budgeted (say $50 million) but very well made. In the months before its release it is shown to virtually every important conservative in America and those conservatives then go out and tell their viewers, listeners, and readers that this is a must-see movie for the right. Anyone want to guess how much money that movie makes? North of one hundred million would be my initial guess, especially when liberals started showing up on television to scream about the movie’s “white-wash” of history.

Here’s another one: Chosin, the story of the First Marine Division’s brilliant retreat under fire from the Chosin Reservoir, during which they inflicted nearly 100,000 casualties upon a Chinese army and managed to bring every man home. Made as a simple, patriotic film in the style of an older war movie. Again, it is pre-screened for conservative spokesmen. Care to wager how much money that one makes?

Another question to ponder: why were the Left Behind books made into nearly zero-budget films in spite of their obvious appeal as movie properties (given the sales of the book) and what sort of treatment do you think will be given to the film version of the Catholic-bashing Da Vinci Code? Would a high budget Left Behind film, cast with major stars and with a huge effects budget, been a hit?

I’m not promising that any of these would be a success, far from it. But I’d be willing to bet that they’d do a fair sight better. Nor am I really proposing to make films ideologically except in the sense I am suggesting that there are a huge number of potentially money-making films which are not being produced for ideological reasons that ought to be made. There’s a huge untapped reservoir of cash out there for the first Hollywood studio that decides it would rather make money than be popular at fashionable night spots.