AFT: Waiting for Superman “Bombed” at Box Office Because of Our Efforts
People’s World reported on last week’s International Labor Communication Association’s annual awards ceremony. The organization recognizes achievement in union journalism – by which they primarily mean journalism as it is practiced by the unions themselves. Nevertheless, People’s World provided this tidbit:
The communications director for the American Federation of Teachers, which hosted the conference, detailed how her union was able to counter the anti-teacher message of Waiting for Superman, the pro-charter school film.
Though Superman had a much higher marketing budget than An Inconvenient Truth, which was made by the same people and employed a similar public relations strategy, it “bombed,” as AFT representative described it, at the box office. This was due to the online work of AFT, notably more through Facebook than the AFT’s own site.
The meme that Waiting for Superman was a box office bomb seems to rely entirely on this Marc Ambinder column for The Atlantic. The film ranks 20th on the list of highest grossing documentaries since 1982 – certainly not as financially successful as Fahrenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth, but its per-theater average take exceeds that of films much higher on the list, including Roger (yikes) Michael Moore’s 9th-ranked Capitalism: A Love Story – which was an actual bomb – and the 3rd-ranked Earth.
Still, the idea that Superman bombed isn’t nearly as objectionable as the notion that AFT caused it to bomb. Maybe one of those labor journalists in the audience could have asked for the source evidence for that claim.
November 29th, 2010 at 08:10
Roger?
November 29th, 2010 at 11:10
Oops. That was a bad one. Corrected.