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Fun with numbers: Fahrenheit 9/11 earned $119 million

Published Tuesday, October 12, 2004 by seanlmccarthy | E-mail this post

You can call Michael Moore a self-indulgent blowhard or a liberal propaganda machine. Go on. Call him that. But to say, as ASU pollster Bruce Merrill did in Sunday's Arizona Republic, that Fahrenheit 9/11 wasn't popular or that it'll have little impact on the campaign -- well, that is absurd. His quote: "There are so few people that see it, and most of them that do are Democrats, that it couldn't possibly influence the outcome of the election." Needless to say, Merrill was not the ASU representative to win today's Nobel Prize for economics. That was Edward Prescott. Prescott could figure out that any movie that earns $119 million at the box office 1) has an impact on popular thinking (warning: self-promotion reference!) and 2) means more than a few people saw the film, which also has sold millions of DVD/VHS copies in its first week of release.