Well, as my very first philosophy teacher [nice Russian lady, but strict] taught me, let's define our terms so that we know what we are talking about.
failure=money raised? no advertising, people who knew about it didn't talk it up. So, little personal buzz. You had to be looking for it to find it.
No media buzz. They hate us. That may sound melodramatic, but it's true and we should never pretend that it isn't.
success? lives changed, one by one - as Galt says, spark by precious spark - a lot. We will never know all those stories.
failure?=after theater market sales: DVD, blue-ray, netflix, etc. etc.
I know what I did personally do promote the movie. I know that I give away copies of Atlas that I buy in used bookstores all the time, especially to those who are competent and sound like they think.
What did you do?

The comment by xthinker88 asks the most important question: how does a movie of a book that has been read by millions, that is the longest running 20th century success story in American fiction, that still sells more than many so-called best sellers, and that spawned a radical new philosophy, how is it possible that it does such meager box office? I wrote a generally favorable review, but finding out that I won't be able to take my mother to it tonight because the theater has pulled it after one week has prompted a mental failure analysis.

I may not be the one to properly conduct this analysis. After all, my novel, The Golden Pinnacle, is still a few sales short of one million, so perhaps I'm not qualified to talk about selling a dramatic work (although I take some comfort from MikeMarotta's quote on creative genius from Ludwig von Mises). However, I ask the question: what did Ayn Rand's fiction (not just AS) have that the movies lacked?

Remembering when I first read The Fountainhead, what kept me turning the pages far into the night, that almost literally burned a hole into my brain, was the recognition of so much truth, stated so well and with such obviously pointed disregard for popular conceptions or what the man and woman on the street's reaction would be. From Howard Roark telling the dean why the architecture taught at his school was hogwash to his speech at the trial, scene after scene was bold, innovative, and most importantly, revealing of unacknowledged truth--how people really are, how society really works. It shed pretense, pomposity, prestige, and all those other false god the mass of men and women spend their quietly desperate lives trying to attain. I was about to set myself on the same course, and am still amazed and grateful that I discovered the uniquely radical revelation that is Rand.

I, and others, have noted that important components of Rand's philosophy, most particularly her atheism and rejection of religion, were omitted. Speeches were shortened and marquee names were given cameo appearances, presumably to give the movie more "mainstream" appeal. However, these moves didn't capture either the mainstream or most of those who read and loved Rand's novels. I think the movies' creators would have done much better if they had, like Rand, ignored what the experts and marketing people say movies should be and followed her lead.

It is Rand's ideas that captivate and it is her speeches that convey those ideas. I was not bored in Part 2 with Rearden's speech in court or d'Anconia's money speech, or Galt's speech in Part 3; I was disappointed that they were so short and undeveloped. Conventional movie wisdom says avoid long speeches, but maybe that's because Hollywood screen writers don't have much to say. This is Ayn Rand, and she had a lot of earth shaking things to say. The speeches have to be edited, of course, but don't boil them down to something that sort of kind of conveys what she meant, but hurriedly moves on to something else lest the audience gets bored. Go after what should be the movies' natural audience--Rand readers--they are intelligent and they want the speeches they found riveting when they read the book. Not only should the speeches that were used have been more fully developed, but more, notably Ragnar's speech to Rearden when he returns his gold and d'Anconia's speech to Rearden on the meaning of sex, should have been included.

Rand readers want her philosophy, the whole philosophy. By focusing almost exclusively on the political and economic, Rand is rendered a mouthpiece for essentially a Libertarian agenda. However, Rand changed lives because she changed people's personal philosophies. How can the movies stay true to Rand's books without mentioning the terms "selfishness," "altruism," or "mysticism?" They can't. The essence of objectivism is reason and the avowal that man is an end in himself, and reciting Galt's formula a few times is nowhere near enough to illustrate the implications of what objectivism actually means.

In the last analysis, I think the commercial failure of these movies stems from a mistake Rand herself did not make: playing to the crowd. They didn't get the crowd, and they didn't get Rand's readers, the natural, no-need-to-market-to audience. To get the people who were excited about Rand's boldly visionary novels and philosophy, the movies would have had to have been bold visionary. As I acknowledged in my reviews of all three, the movies had their merits. However, boldly visionary they were not.

Advertising is not everything. (When was the last time you saw an ad for illegal drugs?) I saw this twice and suffered through trailers for movies I had seen a dozen or 20 times. They had marquees in the theater, and a couple of weeks of online ads on Fandango and the local entertainment blogs. Who cares?

As for Atlas, I saw the first installment in Ann Arbor in 2011 and in the audience was one of my Republican comrades who brought three people who did not know the works of Ayn Rand.

Word of mouth made both _The Fountainhead_ and _Atlas Shrugged_ best sellers.

If you goto the Ayn Rand Institute and find their School Essay Contest site, you will see that many of the winners come from Catholic high schools. No one is advertising _Atlas Shrugged_ there, but people who want it, find it.

The Creative Genius
Far above the millions that come and pass away tower the pioneers, the men whose deeds and ideas cut out new paths for mankind. For the pioneering genius to create is the essence of life. To live means for him to create. The activities of these prodigious men cannot be fully subsumed under the praxeological concept of labor. They are not labor because they are for the genius not means, but ends in themselves. He lives in creating and inventing. For him there is not leisure, only intermissions of temporary sterility and frustration. His incentive is not the desire to bring about a result, but the act of producing it. The accomplishment gratifies him neither mediately nor immediately. It does not gratify him mediately because his fellow men at best are unconcerned about it, more often even greet it with taunts, sneers, and persecution. Many a genius could have used his gifts to render his life agreeable and joyful; he did not even consider such a possibility and chose the thorny path without hesitation. The genius wants to accomplish what he considers his mission, even if he knows that he moves toward his own disaster. Von Mises, _Human Action_, "Action Within the World" (1966 ed., pg 139) http://mises.org/Books/humanaction.pdf

Most of the copies of _Atlas Shrugged_ are "sold" to the Ayn Rand Institute, which gives them away free to any school teacher who asks on behalf of a class. That being as it, Ayn Rand's works do sell continuously and well. See the tallies of book sales here:
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2013/...

A quick update. The movie is no longer playing in my theater. It has two showings in a theater 15 miles away. There are now only 4 theaters still playing it in the greater Philadelphia area based on my fandango search.

To paraphrase Hank Rearden, "the book is good."

Sadly, the movies are not (AS1 gets closest), and the prejudiced media would have acted like Dr Potter if the movies were good.

I heartily recommend the book to anyone who shows a spark (just last night to a dept manager in Sprouts) but not the movies after AS1.

Quite specifically, I don't understand the backers of this movie myself. Why bother to produce if there's no marketing. The Phila newspaper did not have review. There was no ad in the Friday entertainment section.
The film did open in the major venue in Phila, a major venue in Wilmington,and in Cherry Hill
For a film on such a major book, I don't understand why here was no marketing.
Perhaps even contacting all the local college newspapers. The film isn't going to be seen based on wishful thinking by the backers

Harry M