The Fifth Estate: how could it have flopped?

The film about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and, yes, the Guardian, has bombed at the box office. Even though it was stuffed with handsome talent

Appearance: Don't know.

Why not? I haven't seen it.

Find me somebody who has. That won't be easy.

How come? What are we actually talking about here? It's a movie. Came out in October. Total flop. It cost DreamWorks $28m (£17.1m) to make, and Disney about the same again to market, but so far it's taken only $6m worldwide. According to Forbes, that means it's lost more money as a proportion of its production costs than any other major movie this year.

Oh. Is it a comedy about a hapless dad and the misfortunes that befall him as he buys a series of increasingly unreliable large family cars? No. That sounds quite good. This is about WikiLeaks. Journalism is said to be the fourth estate, so I suppose that makes internet crackpots the fifth. The Guardian's in it. You may remember we and WikiLeaks once had a little thing going on.

Wait. Hollywood made a film about us? Well, partly about us, yes.They did it before in The Bourne Ultimatum and now they've done it again. We did mention it a few times, you know.

I must have missed that. Was Pass Notes in it? I don't think Pass Notes played much of a role in the release of the Iraq war logs or the diplomatic cables.

Maybe that's just what we want everyone to think? If so, it's working. In The Fifth Estate the Guardian is mostly represented by Alan Rusbridger, Nick Davies and Ian Katz, with David Leigh mysteriously left out.

Well, I could watch those guys all day. Really talented, heroic people. Handsome, too. Yes, achingly so. Although in the film they were played by Peter Capaldi, David Thewlis and Dan Stevens.

Basic error. Is that why it bombed? Perhaps. The general view is that Benedict Cumberbatch was very good as Julian Assange, but that the story made no sense. And in the absence of a story all you've got to look at is the casual mistreatment of laptops.

What nonsense! Everyone at the Guardian treats the equipment with respect. That's Hollywood for you, I suppose. Totally unrealistic.

Do say: "Perhaps it's all a CIA conspiracy to deny WikiLeaks publicity? Perhaps they made the movie boring by spiking everybody's cappuccinos during filming?"

Don't say: "Yes, I've heard they also had a mole on the set of The Da Vinci Code."

http://www.theguardian.com/film/shortcuts/2013/dec/01/fifth-estate-flopped-julian-assange-wikileaks-guardian