Man on Wire, the highly praised documentary about high-wire artist Philippe Pettit's daring walk between the World Trade Center's Towers, has exceeded $1.5 million in box office gross, earning doc-hit-of-the-summer status. According to Variety, distributor Magnolia Pictures will screen the 2005 animated short The Man Who Walked Between the Towers in conjunction with showings of Man on Wire, starting this Friday at the Landmark Theatre in Los Angeles and Landmark's Sunshine Cinema in New York City.
According to the indieWIRE BOT, another Magnolia release, Alex Gibney's Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, came in second in the summertime sweepstakes, garnering $1,148,709, while the much-hyped and heavily marketed American Teen is under-performing--Paramount Vantage ponied up a reported $2.5 million at Sundance--at $861,817. Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World is inching towards the $1 million mark at $837,767; Up the Yangtse, which Zeitgeist released in April, is still hanging around at $721,007 in US box office gross (I had reported a North American cume of $1,228,486 a few weeks ago), and Patrick Creadon's I.O.U.S.A. clocked in at $706,894 in just its first week of release. The film, about the US national debt crisis, screened at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.