Anti-Obama Documentary a Box Office Hit - East Idaho News
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Anti-Obama Documentary a Box Office Hit

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Getty 120911 BarackObama?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1345661905130Win McNamee/Getty Images(NEW YORK) — A documentary highly critical of President Obama’s past became the second highest-grossing documentary of the year last weekend, grossing $1.2 million last weekend.

2016: Obama’s America, based on conservative author Dines D’Souza’s book The Roots of Obama’s Rage, expanded to 169 theaters nationwide on Friday, following the success of its limited release to 61 theaters over the past month, the Hollywood Reporter first reported.

Overall the documentary has grossed slightly more than $2 million since it opened at one theater in Houston on July 13, making it the 12th highest-grossing political documentary in history.

The film, D’Souza said, is “a vista” of Obama’s life, following his childhood from Hawaii to Indonesia to Kenya, his father’s birthplace, to Chicago. D’Souza claims that his documentary looks at “just how different” Obama is because of his multicultural upbringing, which the author claims led Obama to subscribe “to an ideology that sees America very differently.”

“Obama has an agenda that is different than what many and maybe a majority of Americans want,” D’Souza told ABC News after his film’s premiere in Texas last month.

The author, who stars in the documentary, said the president wants “a fairly dramatic expansion of state control over a whole range of industries” and a “rapid and startling weakening of America’s position particularly in the Middle East.” He also wants “to shrink America’s footprint in the world because he thinks we’ve been stepping on the world.”

All of these priorities, D’Souza claims, stem from his father’s Kenyan roots and Obama’s “very different upbringing.”

“I expect them to walk out of the theater saying it is a little hard to believe we have had for four years a man in the White House that we never fully knew,” D’Souza said of the reaction he expects people to have to his movie. “I think it’s fair to say across the spectrum that’s what people will say.”

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio

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