Alex Gibney's Musk documentary has already almost vanished from theaters

Concerns about this trace back to a report from industry site Showbiz411, which points, among other things, to Bleecker’s own documentation to highlight the inconsistency. Indeed, the film company’s web site has a “Find Theaters” option for Musk that is currently woefully inaccurate; it lists more than 400 theaters where the movie was supposedly set to open on October 23—almost none of which have showings of the movie today. (The list claims to have been updated on October 20.) A perusal of online movie showtime sites, meanwhile, shows that while the movie is still running in a handful of theaters in about half the United States this weekend, Musk has disappeared from most major metro centers almost completely. (New York is, as far as we can tell, still showing it in a single theater, for instance, once a day at 10 a.m.) 

Of course, the answer to all this could be extraordinarily simple: Musk is a four-hour movie that made crap money in its first two weeks of release. Like, really crap money: Per Box Office Mojo, the movie has made less than $1 million in two weeks it’s been available, having ranked a miserable 20th in the domestic rankings on the week when it went nationwide. Theaters don’t really like devoting chunks of their real estate to movies that people aren’t watching, and which they can only show six times in a day, to boot. (This is also a pretty good likely genesis for reports of theaters notifying ticket buyers for future showings that their screenings have been canceled.) But, of course, those economic realities can’t help but run straight into the narrative surrounding Musk’s pretty clear displeasure with the idea of people seeing the film, or the ways the usual promotional apparatus has very publicly backed away from Gibney’s movie, either.

Gibney, for his part, is staying fairly neutral; while he pointed on Saturday to a recent Status interview he did about Musk’s alleged efforts to suppress the film, he’s also been responding to fans pointing out its absence with a simple exhortation to “See it while you can,” while pointing viewers to a few theaters still airing it. The real question, meanwhile, is going to be what happens when the movie’s VOD, and then streaming, windows open up: HBO Documentary Films currently holds the U.S. streaming rights to the movie, so it’ll be interesting to see how it performs there when (or, we say with a slight tinge of nervousness, if) people have the chance to take Gibney’s epic in in the comfort of their own homes.