Gore's new movie: an 'inconvenient bomb' at the box office

The numbers for weekend movie sales are in, and Al Gore’s new movie, a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth, called An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power  (AIT2) tanked at the box office this weekend according to numbers gathered by movie sites “Box Office Mojo” and IMDB.

The opening weekend for any new movie is usually when the public, rife with anticipation, lines up to buy tickets at theaters. In this case, the opening weekend seemed to signal a major lack of interest on the part of the public, but more importantly, lack of interest in promoting the film by the studio itself, Paramount, who limited the opening weekend to just 4 theaters nationwide.

According to Box Office Mojo, AIT2 opened in just 4 theaters, and earned a measly $124,823.00 and put it at number 28, well behind other movies opening that weekend:

This is quite a departure from how the film was received at the preview at the Sundance Film Festival back on January 19th. According to Variety:

“An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” kicked off the 2017 Sundance Film FestivalThursday night, bringing a strongly positive response from an audience of 1,200 at the Eccles Center Theater.Though Al Gore announced in “An Inconvenient Sequel” that he is a recovered politician, the audience at the Sundance Film Festival reacted to the follow-up to 2006’s “Inconvenient Truth” like they wish he would get back in the game.Many stood at the end of the film to applaud Gore, who compared the cause of slowing climate change to other great moral causes of the modern era — like women’s suffrage and civil rights.

…

Reminiscent of the original, “An Inconvenient Sequel” depicted dire consequences of a warming earth — from flooding in Miami and the Philippines, to the worst drought on record in Syria, bringing human suffering there that predated the ongoing civil war, to air pollution so bad in some parts of China that life expectancy has declined by six years.

The now 68-year-old Gore acknowledges that he “would be lying” if he didn’t admit slow progress on slowing greenhouses gases sometimes causes him despair. “In order to fix the climate crisis we have to fix the democracy crisis,” he declares.After receiving his standing ovation following the premiere, Gore told the crowd that despite repeated setbacks there is reason to have hope for progress on climate change.

In essence, Gore is admitting that there’s not a lot of interest for action on his cause. Could it be because the majority of people just don’t believe him?

I’m not sure Mr. Gore will recover any momentum like he had with the original AIT film in 2006. In my opinion he’s become largely irrelevant in the climate debate, mainly due to the multitude of failed claims and factual errors in his statements overs the years. For example, it was shown that in a Gore-produced “high school science experiment” film about carbon dioxide, that the results demonstrating warming had to be faked in post production to make the experiment work. We caught and called him out on it, and yet the video remains on his website today, years later.

If Gore really speaks “Truth to Power” you’d think he’d want to remove that video, especially when a rival has clearly shown his “high school science experiment” results to be entirely fabricated. Apparently, the man has no scruples.

In AIT2, there’s similar failures and fabrications, as Bjorn Lomborg points out in a Wall Street Journal article

The former vice president has a poor record. Over the past 11 years Mr. Gore has suggested that global warming had caused an increase in tornadoes, that Mount Kilimanjaro’s glacier would disappear by 2016, and that the Arctic summers could be ice-free as soon as 2014. These predictions and claims all proved wrong.

“An Inconvenient Truth” promoted the frightening narrative that higher temperatures mean more extreme weather, especially hurricanes. The movie poster showed a hurricane emerging from a smokestack. Mr. Gore appears to double down on this by declaring in the new film’s trailer: “Storms get stronger and more destructive. Watch the water splash off the city. This is global warming.”

This is misleading. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—in its Fifth Assessment Report, published in 2013—found “low confidence” of increased hurricane activity to date because of global warming. Storms are causing more damage, but primarily because more wealthy people choose to live on the coast, not because of rising temperatures.

In the trailer, Mr. Gore addresses “the most criticized scene” of his previous documentary, which suggested that “the combination of sea-level rise and storm surge would flood the 9/11 Memorial site.” Then viewers are shown footage of Manhattan taking on water in 2012 after superstorm Sandy, apparently vindicating Mr. Gore’s claims. Never mind that what he actually predicted was flooding caused by melting ice in Greenland.

Mr. Gore declares in his new film that “it is right to save humanity.” No argument here. But is using scare tactics really the best way to go about it?

Gore is clearly mostly about propaganda, and both sides of the climate debate now recognize this. One wonders if Mr. Gore isn’t past his expiration date when it comes to climate.