How Much Did ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’ Earn at the American Box Office?

It was only a few years ago that everyone was proclaiming the box-office triumph of nonfiction films. "Winged Migration," a movie about birds in flight, grossed over $11 million, a rare bird indeed. "Spellbound" was a surprise success. Morgan Spurlock's big Mac-attack "Super Size Me" made another $11 million, a high-calorie hit in a field where $1 million had been considered boffo. Then in 2004 came Michael Moore's blistering polemic "Fahrenheit 9/11," exploding all notions of what a nonfiction film could achieve with blockbuster-like grosses of $119 million. A year later came the ultimate fluke hit, a French-made documentary about penguins that was so successful ($77 million) I don't have to give the title.

The boom was on, the gold rush began. Distributors gobbled up docs at prices no one was used to paying. The market was flooded with product: some of it superb and laden with critical praise; some of it urgent and timely; some of it aimed at niche markets that would presumably rush out to see a movie about their favorite subjects: crossword puzzles, wine, women's high-school basketball; some of it merely mediocre but so cheap to make in the new era of over-the-counter digital filmmaking that investors figured they had nothing to lose.

Then everybody got burned. Unless documentaries were made by Michael Moore, or featured Al Gore talking about inconvenient truths, the theatrical market for these films collapsed. Huge expectations ran into a wall of audience indifference: "Crazy Love" was supposed to go through the roof yet it made a measly $301,000. "Taxi to the Dark Side" won the best-documentary Oscar—and its grosses, paltry to begin with, went down! Alex Gibney, the director of this tough movie about the torture of terror suspects by Americans, is suing THINKFilm, its distributor, for what he says was an inadequate release. With all due respect to Gibney, he's kidding himself if he thinks tons of marketing money could have made a difference. Even Errol Morris's high-profile film on Abu Ghraib, "Standard Operating Procedure," flopped—$209,000.

When times are tough, bad news is the toughest sell. Then why did "Fahrenheit 9/11" succeed while all the subsequent Iraqmovies failed? It's all in the timing, says Moore, who has three of the five top-grossing nonfiction films in history. "If you wait until it's safe to make an Iraq War film, people don't need to go to be told it's a bad idea," he says. "If it feels like medicine or a lecture, they won't go." Moore's point is reinforced by the relative success of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," which, at $7.6 million, is 2008's second most-popular nonfiction film (behind the concert film "U2 3D"). Though reviled by critics, this creationist polemic with Ben Stein reached an audience hungry for its antiDarwinian message.

No distributor has been more invested in quality documentary films than THINKFilm. Its president, Mark Urman, estimates that 40 percent of its releases have been nonfiction. " 'Spellbound' made a ton of money, and we went on a binge," he says ruefully. "One thing I learned is that topicality doesn't sell a ticket." THINKFilm is still releasing nonfiction films, but only the most special ones—it's now distributing HBO's "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," after it has been shown on cable, and Werner Herzog's amazing "Encounters at the End of the World," which did sold-out business its first week in New York. The future of Urman's company, facing lawsuits from creditors it has been unable to pay, is up in the air.

The irony is that we are in the midst of a great era of documentaries—but the audience is a stay-at-home crowd, not the kids who rush out to watch superheroes blow stuff up. Millions watch documentaries on HBO, PBS and the Discovery Channel, and on DVDs. "They've come home to roost where they belong," says Sheila Nevins, the HBO documentary head often called the Queen of the Docs. "The graying of America may be bad for documentary and independent feature films, but it's good for television." Several million people, she claims, see even the lowest-rated documentaries shown on HBO. "You're paying for it, and you want to get your money's worth." In her 25 years at HBO she's seen an almost 300 percent increase in documentary films made. The ones about sex, she says, do the best.