Fahrenheit vs. Passion Redux

Last October, I predicted that George Bush would win the election based on the fact that The Passion of the Christ was out-boxofficing Fahrenheit 9/11 three-to-one.

In October, Moore was talking about how Fahrenheit was scoring big in Red States, even in North Carolina and Oklahoma. But there was no information available to disprove it, because only boxoffice stats were available. But the boxoffice was impressive enough, topping out at Passion drawing $370 million and Fahrenheit garnering a relatively paltry $119 million.

Now Byron York has produced the real goods in his book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: Hollywood over- and under-perfomance stats. The statistics evaluate the film's performance within each of the Country's DMA's, Demographic Marketing Areas, compared to that DMA's share of the total American film market. The results are astounding.

Here are Fahrenheit's top five over-performing markets. The percentage is the amount above the market's expected DMA:

• Vancouver, Canada +96% (in other words, nearly double what you'd expect a movie to do in Vancouver)
  
• Victoria, Canada +82.1%
• San Francisco, Cal. +73.2%
  
• Tornonto, Canada +73.1%
• Ottowa, Canada +67.8%

Obviously, Canadian voters weren't in a position to help Kerry's cause. San Francisco broke the top five and the movie did very well in New York, Boston and DC. It underformed by three percent in LA thanks to my hometown of Orange County which is in the Los Angeles DMA.

But how about in the critical swing states? Surely all that Michael Moore touring in the last weeks of the campaign helped. Well, here's Ohio's major markets:

• Columbus -17.5%
• Cincinnati -15.1%
• Dayton -33.3%
• Toledo -25.0%

And those are in the blue-ish big cities. Imagine how poorly it fared in the suburban and rural Ohio towns. The same held for Florida and Missouri -- Fahrenheit underperformed in the major markets. Quoting York:

In Greensboro, North Carolina, Where Moore said the film had been enthusiastically received, it underperomed by nearly 27 percent. And in Fayetteville and Tulsa, where Moore boasted that his movie had sold out, Fahrenheit 9/11 under-performed by 41 percent and 50 percent, respectively.

So the Dems and Moore just lied about performance to go on top of the lies in the film, while Passion creamed Fahrenheit in the red states, and had lower underperformer downside than Fahrenheit had overperformer upside.

Lies vs. morality. A paraphrase of the election.