While Elon Musk was busy unveiling a flying car on Friday, Alex Gibney's four-hour documentary 'Musk' was busy bombing at the box office. The film, which debuted on 468 screens after opening last weekend on just four, earned a paltry $307,000 — a per-screen average of $649, according to Breitbart's John Nolte. By comparison, the Melania Trump documentary 'Melania' opened on 1,778 screens and earned $4,027 per screen.
The contrast could not be starker. On Friday, Musk unveiled the Roadster — a vehicle that actually flies, goes from zero to 60 mph in under a second, and features a cup holder engineered to hold a Big Gulp. It is the kind of spectacle that captures the public imagination. Gibney's film, by contrast, is a four-hour hit piece that even leftists who hate Musk apparently had no interest in watching.
According to World of Reel, the budget for 'Musk' is estimated to be in the $10 million range. HBO pre-bought the streaming rights, but that was before David Ellison took over. The film earned a 97 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, proving that critics loved it — but audiences stayed home. As Nolte noted, if Musk were a Democrat, Gibney would have produced a four-hour love letter. Instead, the filmmaker targeted Musk for political assassination because of his right-of-center politics and his association with President Donald Trump.
Instagram posts promoting the documentary described it as an 'epic four hour documentary portrait' and 'epic new documentary' charting Musk's rise. The promotional push was clearly not enough to overcome audience disinterest. The film's failure at the box office is a clear signal that the public is not buying what the legacy media and its Hollywood allies are selling.
Musk, meanwhile, continues to build. He is running Tesla, SpaceX, and serves as a senior advisor to President Trump, leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). His companies are launching rockets, catching them on landing, deploying satellites, and now, flying cars. The Roadster demo is the latest in a long line of achievements that make the case for American innovation and entrepreneurship.
The box office numbers for 'Musk' are a referendum on the documentary itself. The film's per-screen average of $649 is abysmal, especially when compared to the success of 'Melania,' which earned more than six times as much per screen. The audience has spoken, and they are not interested in a four-hour smear job.
Our Take
Let's be honest about what happened here. Alex Gibney set out to destroy Elon Musk with a four-hour political hit piece, and the American people responded by staying home. That's the free market working exactly as it should. While Musk was literally flying a car — a feat that would have seemed impossible a decade ago — Gibney was stuck in a theater wondering where his audience went. The answer is simple: patriots are tired of the same old smear campaigns dressed up as 'documentaries.' They want progress, not propaganda. They want flying cars, not four-hour lectures from Hollywood elites who hate Donald Trump and everyone associated with him. The box office doesn't lie. The only question now is whether Hollywood will finally learn its lesson, or keep pumping millions into projects that nobody wants to watch.
