Mood:  cheeky

[...] I asked Rove what he thought of Michael Moore?s blastingly anti-Bush movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. Had it had an effect on the presidential race?

"It?s an artful piece of propaganda," Rove said.

Was that all? Had he seen the picture?

"I plead guilty to violating the copyright laws of the United States by watching a bootleg DVD," Rove answered with a grin. "I refuse to enrich [Moore]," he added, giving the clear impression that he had a rather low opinion of the filmmaker.

With a little more prodding, Rove said he wasn?t worried about the picture and did not see it playing a substantial role in the election. But he had watched it ? at a time when some others on the White House staff were saying they would not see it. Rove was too careful a man, and his mind too wide-ranging, not to want to judge for himself.

One key measure studios apply to a picture?s performance is whether it does better or worse than might be expected in any given DMA [i.e., Designated Market Area]. They do that by calculating each DMA?s share of the total North American box office. Los Angeles, for example, accounts for 8.32 percent of the box office for all films, New York for 7.78 percent, and San Francisco for 3.40 percent. If the San Francisco box office for a film accounts for more than 3.40 percent of a film?s total gross, the film is said to have overperformed in San Francisco. If the city accounted for, say, 5.10 percent of a picture?s North American gross, then the film would be said to have overperformed by 50 percent. Studios use those measurements to compare films with one another, and entire film genres with one another. Do action pictures do better in Philadelphia? Romantic comedies in St. Louis? That sort of thing.

Overall, Fahrenheit 9/11 did extremely well in North America?s top eight markets, according to the numbers compiled by Nielsen EDI. The film actually underperformed slightly in the largest market, Los Angeles, down just under 4 percent from the market?s normal DMA share. (That was probably due to the presence of conservative Orange County, which makes up a significant part of the Los Angeles DMA.) But it overperformed in the next seven largest markets. In New York it overperformed by nearly 43 percent; Fahrenheit 9/11 took in 11.12 percent of its total box office in that city alone. It did even better in San Francisco, overperforming by 73 percent, and did above-normal business in Chicago, Toronto (by 79 percent), Philadelphia, Boston (by 49 percent), and Washington DC (by 62 percent).

Fahrenheit 9/11 also did well in Seattle, Montreal, Ottawa, Portland, Oregon, Monterey, California, and Burlington, Vermont. In all, two things stand out from those numbers. One is that the picture overperformed only in blue states, and even then only in the most urban parts of those blue states. And the second is that it did very well in Canada. Fahrenheit 9/11 consistently overperformed in Canadian cities; without that boffo business, the film?s gross would have been significantly smaller than it was.