Obama Documentary, 2016 Hitting Big Box Office Numbers

Written by Micah Clark, AFA of Indiana

While this past weekend saw an 18% decline in movie box office receipts from last year and drew the least income among the top 12 grossing films since 2008, one movie is doing better than most people ever predicted.  Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016: Obama’s America, the conservative feature film has earned over $26 million in the US, making it the second highest-grossing political documentary of all-time.

Although not on a huge number of screens and widely dismissed by the media, the film is doing well and more importantly it is worth seeing. I have been a fan of Dinesh D’Souza for a long time. In fact, I am still reeling from losing my signed copy of his outstanding book, What’s So Great About Christianity? when we brought him in to speak on it a few years ago.

Yet, 2016 is not what you might expect. I went to see the film with quite a bit of reservation and hesitation. I thought that I would leave the theater angry and even more worried about having a “Manchurian President” groomed by a bevy of socialists, Marxists and America-haters. Yet, that was not the impact of the film. It actually humanizes the President and helps the viewer understand one of the least known individuals to ever reach the White House.

The film is well done, and far more balanced than you might think. Dinesh is not dogmatic that this is absolutely who Barack Obama is at his core. He admits that this is but one explanation among several other suggestions.  (One of the more provocative theories is from a book called Dreams From my Real Father, which claims that Frank Marshall Davis, a communist in Hawaii, was Barack’s true biological father and his most influential childhood mentor, rather than the polygamist, Kenyan, Barack Obama, Sr whom the President met but only a time or two.)

Yet, 2016 does seem to answer more questions than other theories about the President’s background, his worldview and particularly how it explains his foreign policy agenda. The engaging 89-minute movie leaves you with the feeling that you have just sat through a very good college lecture. We have our review of the movie on the top page link on our web site here: www.afain.net