With last summer’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore managed to bump global warming to the top of the national consciousness – and sell over $24 million of U.S. tickets. Now Leonardo DiCaprio is betting he can repeat the feat.
Mr. DiCaprio hosts, narrates and partly funded “The 11th Hour,” a documentary out today that paints a bleak picture of humanity’s prospects unless environmental policy is shifted almost immediately. It’s just one of an unusual number of politically motivated documentaries slated to hit tin coming months, from a Darfur film featuring Don Cheadle to “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which uses the death of an Afghadriver to examine U.S. detention policies.
But America’s stomach for such sobering fare may be starting to flag. Ticket sales this year for documentaries are down about 25% to roughly $27 million compared with this point last year – and Michael Moore’s “Sicko” accounted for all but about $3.7 million of that, according to Media by Numbers. By contrast, at this time last year, documentaries other than “An Inconvenient Truth” had racked up about $13 million at the box office.