Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary about Elon Musk stumbled badly in its first weekend of wide release, pulling in roughly $307,000 across 468 screens for a per-screen average of about $649, according to figures cited by Breitbart’s John Nolte. The film had opened the previous weekend on four screens before expanding.
The poor showing became the hook for a broader Nolte column that set the documentary’s box office against Musk’s Friday unveiling of what Nolte described as a functioning flying car — the Roadster — pitched with a sub-one-second zero-to-60 time and, in Nolte’s telling, a cup holder built to hold a Big Gulp.
Nolte’s argument, boiled down: the man building cars, catching rockets and launching satellites is the story people care about, and a four-hour critical portrait of him is not.
A comparison to Melania’s documentary
To sharpen the point, Nolte reached for another recent political-adjacent release. The documentary Melania, he noted, opened on 1,778 screens and still managed $4,027 per screen — a figure that dwarfed Gibney’s per-screen take despite the far larger footprint.
Nolte framed the contrast as self-explanatory, arguing the irony of the moment — a filmmaker flinging criticism at a man who had just flown a car — needed little elaboration. His stated explanation for Gibney’s project is political: that Musk drew the documentary treatment because of his right-of-center politics and his association with President Donald Trump. Nolte asserted that had Musk been a Democrat, Gibney would have produced “a four-hour love letter” instead. That characterization is Nolte’s opinion, not a claim Gibney has made.
What makes the box office result notable, by Nolte’s account, is that it can’t be pinned on hostile critics. Musk holds a 97 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and Nolte quoted several glowing notices to make the point that the film was well received by reviewers even as audiences stayed away.
Among the reviews he cited: Peter Travers, who called it a four-hour “ass-kicking” that the “dark prince of tech billionaires” deserves and declared it “so worth it”; the Saturday Evening Post, which highlighted the closing shot as a cautionary word about ceding too much control over one’s life to a single person; the San Jose Mercury News, which praised Gibney for assembling “a frightening portrait of a cocky businessman” with an excess of everything, “including global power”; and RogerEbert.com, which credited new interviews with people who know Musk — including tech expert Kara Swisher, columnist Cory Doctorow and WIRED editor Katie Drummond — as well as former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, who the review said adds “heart-wrenching details” about the impact of the DOGE shutdown of USAID.
The political read
Nolte’s column is less a box office report than a partisan victory lap, and it says so. He argued that even left-leaning viewers who dislike Musk showed no interest in watching the film, and he closed by asserting that “the left can only destroy.” That framing — the documentary as political hit job rather than artistic endeavor — is the columnist’s interpretation, offered without supporting evidence beyond the film’s subject matter and Musk’s politics.
The underlying numbers, though, are the numbers. A documentary that critics embraced and that landed on nearly 500 screens failed to convert that goodwill into ticket sales, a result that has become a familiar story for political documentaries in recent years regardless of which direction they lean.
For Musk, the weekend offered a split-screen of its own: a product unveiling designed to generate headlines and a critical film that generated far fewer paying customers. Nolte’s conclusion was blunt — the audience made its choice, and it wasn’t the one Gibney was selling.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2026/10/19/nolte-elon-musk-flew-a-car-while-alex-gibneys-musk-bombed-at-box-office/