The producers of the two Atlas Shrugged movies made it official this week. Atlas Shrugged, Part 3, will release to theaters next summer. The producers face a challenge: how to keep their series relevant. Have the American people turned their backs on the American work ethic and all the inalienable rights to life, liberty and property? The producers of Atlas Shrugged are betting that they haven’t.
Everything has a breaking point. So reads the tag line in yesterday’s new release, Atlas Shrugged, Part Two. And this latest Atlas Shrugged movie shows what happens when a national government breaks its people’s will to live and work as usual. The result: the country itself breaks apart.
The movie 2016: Obama’s America (prod. and dir. Dinesh D’Souza; Rocky Mountain Pictures, 2012) showed surprising box-office strength last weekend. Box Office Mojo lists it as the seventh best money earner. Entertainment Weekly says it is already the highest-earning political documentary of all time. (Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, 2008, held that record until last weekend.) What makes the 2016 movie so popular? Probably because it sets up a contrast between two young men, each with a background in a former British colony. So they have the same kind of heritage. And the former colonies have the same grinding poverty that followed independence. But the two men learned diametrically opposite lessons. One of those two men is Dinesh D’Souza, producer and director of the 2016 movie. The other is our putative President, Barack Hussein Obama.
The Hunger Games (dir. Gary Ross; with Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, and Donald Sutherland; Lionsgate Pictures, 2012) came out on DVD, Blu-ray, download, and “video on demand” last Saturday (August 18). The three books (by Suzanne Collins) that form the basis of the film now outsell the seven Harry Potter books at Amazon.com. But how many people who read the books or see the film (and its one, maybe two sequels) will get the point? The Hunger Games is more than a young-adult adventure drama. It shows what America will look like under the totalitarianism that Barack Obama and his Czars have planned. It is exactly what Ronald Reagan warned us about.
As most of us know by now, 2016 has been showing only in limited locations and for very abbreviated time frames. It is not clear why, but it may have something to do with liberal fear of the truth.
Atlas Shrugged, Part 2, will shortly go into production, The Atlas Society announced yesterday. It will release in October of 2012—squarely in the middle of the election campaign. The timing could affect the dynamics of the campaign and the movie’s box-office receipts.
Many critics panned Atlas Shrugged, Part One as portraying things that could never happen in America. News flash: they can, and are.
The new Atlas Shrugged franchise will continue. The next installment will come next year—during the election campaign.
You are on a train making a wild run to a certain wreck. You try to stop it. Nobody is willing to help you. You can either ride the train to the inevitable smash-up. Or you can jump. And somewhere out there, someone is already telling those who should be your friends to jump off the train. Jump where? Into what? You don’t know. But someday you’ll have to find out. That is the dilemma that Strike Productions’ new movie, Atlas Shrugged, Part One, sets for you.
Atlas Shrugged (1957) broke the rules and got very bad reviews. So why is it so popular today?
Ayn Rand’s signature novel has several things wrong with it:
So why is this novel so popular? No publisher in his right mind would buy it today. No publisher would buy it even from an author in its own stable. Even if that author had another word-of-mouth best-seller (The Fountainhead) to her credit, they still wouldn’t buy it. Why Bennet Cerf at Random House bought it, probably no modern acquisition editor can figure out.
