Alex Gibney’s documentary about Elon Musk got great reviews at Venice in September. Two weeks after it opened in the US it was out of cinemas, with $571,902 at the box office, and everyone called it a flop. I’m not convinced. Before it opened, Musk spent days insulting Gibney on X and his lawyer threatened to sue. YouTube, TikTok and Meta wouldn’t run ads for the trailer because they said it was political. X just said no. Then, the day before it went out to 472 cinemas, TikTok shut down the film’s account. It came back later and TikTok said it had been a mistake, but by then the big weekend was over. To be fair, the film is nearly four hours long, which doesn’t help. But it never got a proper go.
Nobody banned it. Nobody had to. Every platform had a reasonable-sounding excuse, a policy here and a mistake there, and between them they shut it out on the one weekend that decides whether a film survives. We’re used to this on social media, where your post quietly stops reaching anyone and nobody tells you why. This is the same thing happening to a real film in real cinemas. The story was covered, but in the trade press, and most people get their news from the same apps that were doing the blocking. So all they heard was the box office number. Next time something you cared about seems to just disappear, ask yourself whether people didn’t want it or never got to hear about it.
Based on Nobody banned this film by Aldo Grech, which goes into much more detail. Worth a read.