This week Neil Calloway looks why American Sniper is breaking box office records…
I’ve read a lot about American Sniper since it was released; about the fake plastic babies it uses instead of real children, about how Michael Moore said snipers were cowards (and then backtracked and said he liked the film), about how it might actually influence a real life murder trial, and lots about how much money it has made. I haven’t read anything suggesting why it has made so much money.
First, the facts – American Sniper had the biggest January opening of a film ever in the US, the biggest for a drama, the biggest Thursday night R rated opening (more than double that of the previous record holder, last year’s Lone Survivor, which we’ll get back to), the biggest for a Clint Eastwood film; the list goes on. In short, it made back its relatively modest $58 million dollar budget in its opening weekend.
The main reason the film made money is that it is a compelling story, well told, with a great central performances from Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller. It deserves its five star review from Flickering Myth.
The other reason is its story. Since Operation Neptune Spear, the mission that ended with the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, there has been an increased interest in US Special Forces, in particularly the Navy Seals. Zero Dark Thirty, Lone Survivor and American Sniper are all part of this, as are direct to DVD films like Seal Team 8: Behind Enemy Lines, which turns out to be the fourth film in the Behind Enemy Lines franchise, not the eighth film in a Seal Team franchise you’d never heard of. There is precedent here; when the SAS gained mainstream publicity following the success of the Iranian Embassy Siege, the film Who Dares Wins followed two years later. The public have an appetite for true tales of special forces missions; the biggest selling war memoir of all time, anywhere is Andy McNab’s story of his Gulf War SAS mission gone wrong, Bravo Two Zero.
There’s another reason I suspect the film has done so well. It is a good story about the Iraq War. I wrote an MA dissertation about post 9/11 US Cinema, and let me tell you, there are not many films set in Iraq that are uplifting in anyway, or paint US soldiers in a good light. They show abuse, post traumatic stress, murder. American Sniper is a true story of good against evil based in Iraq. A good family man is killing bad people and protecting American lives. More than 4000 US servicemen and woman lost their lives in Iraq; their friends, their families, the communities that lost them will want to hear a good story from that conflict, they want to know that someone like Chris Kyle was out there, looking out for ordinary soldiers. We’d rather the Iraq War be about Chris Kyle than Abu Ghraib and lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction. Lone Survivor offered the chance of hope and reconciliation amongst wasted lives in Afghanistan. It would be surprising if the films didn’t do well.
The veracity of claims made in both American Sniper and Lone Survivor has been challenged, but that adds to the special forces mystique; secret missions aren’t easily verifiable, but the directors of both films understand what small town America wants; Clint Eastwood was the mayor of a small town, and if you don’t think Peter Berg understands small town America, then you haven’t seen Friday Night Lights (Chris Kyle was from Odessa, Texas, where the book and the film of Friday Night Lights were set). This isn’t “liberal Hollywood” telling people in Nebraska how they should feel about America’s wars, as the first wave of Iraq War films in 2007 and 2008 seemed to be; it is notable that so many of those films failed to make an impact at the box office; who is going to see a film that paints the war your son is fighting in as a mistake?
As we get further away from the Iraq War, and more distant from the arguments over the right, wrongs and mistakes of that conflict, we’ll get more films that tell stories of the war without having to deal with the political baggage that comes with it. If they are as good as American Sniper, I’ll be happy.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future installments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszFJHnpNzqHh6gswQ0Srpi5E&v=qqtW2LRPtQY&x-yt-cl=84503534&x-yt-ts=1421914688&feature=player_embedded
Originally published January 25, 2015. Updated April 15, 2018.
