…as in Crying Over You.

The Guardian reports that Oliver Stone believes his Alexander movie didn’t do well because of “raging fundamentalism in morality” and that people couldn’t deal with “an action-hero who was masculine/feminine.”

So why did Oliver Stone make this movie? Did he not know his audience? Let’s suppose, for a minute, that his actual intent is really a historically close account of what went on. Did he actually bother to measure the potential for revenue for this topic? The book about Alexander highest on Amazon.com has a rank of 5,980. The hardcover edition has a rank of 368,937. By contrast, a book on punctuation is #18!

Gay characters do not a bomb necessarily make. The Birdcage grossed $185 million worldwide, 67% in the States. Alexander has only grossed $79 million, 42.7% stateside.

It would seem that Mr. Stone has set himself up a straw man argument, that nobody liked his movie because of his title character’s sexual preferences. He may have failed deliberately, so that he could use the results from his movie to provide social commentary. The marketplace spoke; Mr. Stone lost. If he wants to make more money on a movie, perhaps he should afford some deviation from the “truth”. As evidenced in JFK, this is not a concept that is foreign to him.