• • Box Office Report: 'Taken 2' Defeats Newcomers 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Paul Ryan  | Atlas Shrugged: Part II [...] opened aggressively on 1,012 screens but still took in just an estimated $1.7 million, about the same as the first installment earned in April 2011 when it opened on just 299 screens. You'd think that this weekend, after Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan's vice presidential debate performance and with the election less than a month away, a movie based on Rand's magnum opus would be a big seller. However, it's just one of many political movies flailing in the marketplace.      View blog reactions

• • The birds of ‘Rio’ slay ‘Scream 4’: Box office report April 15-17 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | The other new indie drama [besides The Conspirator] that earned a lot of buzz this weekend, ‘Atlas Shrugged: Part I,’ boasted a similar per-screen average ($5,590). Opening on just 300 screens, the long-awaited Ayn Rand adaptation took in an estimated $1.7 million, debuting in 14th place. Whether that’s enough for the film to earn back its reported $10 million budget (and ensure that the other two parts of the projected trilogy get made) is unclear. After all, if everyone who’d purchased a copy of Rand’s popular novel just in the last two years had bought a ticket, the movie would have earned $4 million.      View blog reactions

• • • Will ‘Atlas Shrugged’ (and other “unfilmmable” books) ever get made? 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | [ Atlas Shrugged] is 1,100 pages long, its characters are less flesh-and-blood humans than mouthpieces for various philosophical points, and its climax is a 60-page speech by the mysterious hero, who doesn’t even show up until near the end of the book. None of that has stopped Hollywood from wanting to film it. Those who’ve tried over the last 40 years to make it fly include ‘Godfather’ producer Albert S. Ruddy; NBC (which planned an eight-hour miniseries in the late 1970s); Rand herself (who was at work on a screenplay before her death in 1982); TNT (whose plans for a four-hour miniseries fell apart in 2000); ‘Braveheart’ screenwriter Randall Wallace; Lionsgate (which returned to the eight-hour miniseries idea)/ and Jolie, who reportedly called it “a once-in-a-lifetime project.”      View blog reactions