'Miracle At St. Anna' Flops At The Box-Office, Spike Lee's Oscar Hopes Already Dashed?

Spike Lee is not having a good week. His WWII-epic, “Miracle At St. Anna” positively flopped at the box-office. The film, which has an estimated budget of $45 million (which frankly sounds conservative) came in a pitiful ninth place on this week’s box office with a paltry $3.4 million total. The film, which is rather long 2 hours and forty six minutes was supposed to be an Oscar hopeful, but since to its D.O.A. arrival, some publications are already calling it a dead duck.

Compare: even Kirk Cameron’s fucking “Fireproof” debuted with $6.5 million, even though it was on 300 less screens. Can we get an “ooof”? Man, looks like Clint Eastwood won this war. Poor Spike. Reviews weren’t much kinder and ‘Miracle has a pathetic 29% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, we’re almost sort of embarrassed that we mostly liked the film (maybe we should all just try and forget that :).

Making matters worse, the film is being blasted in Italy as misrepresenting the facts. ‘Miracle’ links an antifascist Italian partisan resistance group to the 1944 Nazi massacre of 560 Italian civilians, and has evidently offended partisan veteran groups.

The writer of the novel which Lee based his movie from, James McBride has said the story is a work of fiction and has apologized to any veterans that feel offended. Spike on the other hand in characteristic nature is going down swinging. “I am not apologizing for anything. I think these questions are evidence that there is still a lot about your history during the war that you (Italians) have got to come to grips with.”

You [eye-talians]? Oh Spike…