The 'Ender's Game' Boycott Isn't Working

Siiiiigghhh. Guys, it looks like that boycott's not exactly going as planned: Ender's Game is number one at the box office this weekend despite that it's reportedly a just-ok movie and despite the fact that the book was written by a raging bigot. Oops?

I will provide some full disclosure right here by saying that even before the Orson Scott Card controversies I had absolutely zero interest in seeing the Ender's Game movie. In fact, I kept routinely forgetting that it was at thing that was happening except in times when people were like "Don't go see the Ender's Game movie!!!!" and I got to be all hipster about it like and tell them I wasn't planning to in the first place.

Still, it's kind of a horrific bummer that Ender's Game isn't only doing well at the box office — $28 million its opening weekend, to be specific — but landed the number one spot, knocking Bad Grandpa out of first place. It just kind of feels like if Chick-Fil-A were reported as the number-one-selling place to get chicken. Where's Gravity when you need it?!

To add a little bit of a bright side, at least Card will not actually be seeing any monetary profit from this box office haul:

By the time OddLot rescued it from studio development hell a few years later — assigning the screenplay reboot to director Gavin Hood — Card’s involvement, both creative and financial, had dissolved to virtually nil. For all intents and purposes, the Ender’s Game movie was out of his hands.

And so maybe this movie can be judged on the messages within the screenplay and by the performances of its cast, and not on the actions of its original writer? I don't even know, it seems to work for people like Woody Allen, who waspublicly accused of molestation decades ago (and again very recently) but who continues to deliver box office and critical successes that he definitely does profit from. It does not, however, appear to work very well for people like Mel Gibson, whose comeback movie The Beaver flopped at the box office. So maybe it's not a science, it's a really messy effed-up art?

Basically this is nowhere near a simple issue, and this box office news has undoubtedly left a bad taste in a lot of mouths this weekend — and for good reason.

Image: Lionsgate