Despite being widely received by critics and the public as simply a terrible movie, Kirk Cameron is trying to spin the negative media around his new movie, Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, as a positive and would like to thank us godless heathens for all the free attention he’s getting from it.
From the Saving Christmas website:
To quote Barnum [of “The Greatest Show on Earth,” the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus] again: “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” He knew that if his show featured a new attraction that drew no reviews at all, the public wouldn’t know about it — and the show would be a failure. Obviously, he preferred good publicity. However, he knew that bad publicity also sells tickets.
That’s a lesson militant atheists apparently have forgotten. In the last week, we’ve seen an unprecedented campaign against Christian moviemaker Kirk Cameron’s film “Saving Christmas.” But the ironic thing is they are inadvertently filling theaters with moviegoers wondering what all the fuss is about.
The post also claimed the following:
“Saving Christmas” was originally scheduled for a limited two-week run in a few selected cities. However, with all the publicity that atheists have generated denouncing the film, it has been held over — and is expanding to new cities.
This is indeed true, according to Box Office Mojo. Saving Christmas was being shown on just under 300 screens across the United States this weekend, an uptick of 17 from last week but a ways away from the over 400 it had for its first weekend.
And overall, the film has grossed $2,656,000, so one might say that this was a successful movie for the most part that got people to go buy tickets and presumably watch this holiday monstrosity.
That being said, those 17 new screens don’t really account for much. This weekend, the film only grossed a total of $135,000, which is a nearly 50% drop from last weekend.
But Kirk Cameron would like to thank people like me, who wrote about Saving Christmas back when it was initially released, for providing him with a much needed boost in ticket sales.
Now, I don’t feel particularly too bad about talking about or even going to see for myself these sorts of films. I even went to see God’s Not Dead when it was in theaters. I had to be slightly inebriated to get through it, but that’s a whole other story.
Nonetheless, Kirk Cameron earned (I guess) this attention for making such an awful film. Critics, no matter their religious views, did not like this film one bit.
From my original post:
The LA Times called the movie, dubbed Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, an “unholy mess.”
Roger Ebert’s site said it was “a terrible movie regardless of one’s eschatological mindset.”
When I originally wrote about Saving Christmas a few weeks back (and Kirk Cameron’s publicity stunt to artificially inflate its online ratings), it had just a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and only 52% of viewers giving it a favorable rating. The film now has a literal 0% rating on the aggregate review site with only 32% of viewers rating the film favorably.
Not only that, but it has now been awarded the honor of being named IMDB’s worst movie ever, with just 1.5 out of 10 stars.
Kirk Cameron thinks this is a good thing though, claiming that all of the people bashing the films are filling the seats in theaters and making him more money.
This most certainly is not true. According to Joe My God:
The film’s per screen average of $495 was the lowest of all films tracked. With an average ticket price of $8.00, that means a total of about 33 people attended this weekend’s 15 showings at each theater. That’s two people per showing. But everybody got a great seat!
Be sure to spend your hard earned money on something meaningful this holiday season. If you thought about seeing this film to just see how bad it really is…don’t.
Give the money to charity. See a different movie perhaps (like Interstellar or The Theory of Everything). Buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Put it under your mattress. Burn it. I don’t care. Just don’t waste your money on this god-forsaken film.
Happy holidays.
