A Little Quick Math

An American Carol grossed $3,810,000 over the weekend in 1639 theaters.

That's $2324.59 per theater for three days (Oct 3, 4 & 5)

That is about $775 per theater per day on its opening weekend, even though it's been the talk of the Intertubes for 6 weeks.

Let's be charitable and say that each theater showed it for only four shows a day. That means a gross of $193.72 per show.

Again, let's be charitable and balance the $5 Matinee tickets off against the $8.50 big-city evening shows and call the average price $6 a pop. That means an average of 33 people were interested enough to go see An American Carol.

You'd be hard-pressed to find another commercial flop of that type. Even Expelled did a first weekend of $2,970,848 on 1052 screens. Using the same math as above that would be attendance of nearly 40 per show. So, using only box office data for opening weekends, we can conclude that the passing wind that was Ben Stein's last movie was almost 20% more successful than this attempt at, as one reviewer called it, masochistic revenge fantasy.