Israeli doc loses Oscar but soars at the box office
Dror Moreh’s ‘The Gatekeepers’ jumps 20 places in popularity at North American theaters over the weekend
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It didn’t win the Oscar, but Israeli documentary “The Gatekeepers” nevertheless surged at the US box office over the weekend.
While hardly a blockbuster, director Dror Moreh’s film about Israel’s internal intelligence service enjoyed a 241 percent jump in ticket sales — an impressive figure for a movie that had already been out for three weeks.
The documentary, which lost to “Searching for Sugar Man” at Sunday’s Oscar ceremony, expanded to 19 theaters across the US, bringing in a total of $154,000 for the period between Friday and Sunday. Entertainment website Deadline Hollywood described as “solid” its per-screen average of $8,105, which was in fact the second-best of any film showing in the US. (By contrast, the weekend’s overall winner, “Identity Thief,” averaged $4,365 on 3,222 screens, for a total of slightly more than $14 million.)
The bump in business was enough to make “The Gatekeepers” the highest-grossing documentary of the weekend, lifting it from 49th the previous week to 29th overall at the box office.
The film has so far earned $400,400 in North America. “Searching for Sugar Man,” which opened last summer, earned $3.29 million during its run.
“5 Broken Cameras,” another Israeli documentary nominated at this year’s Oscars, premiered in May and sold just over $96,000 in tickets.
The Times of Israel Community.