Stein’s Anti-Evolutionary Doc Expelled Trying to Organize a Theatrical Comeback?

With Expelled down to just a handful of theaters nationwide, it certainly looked like it’s theatrical run was pretty much over and done with. The film’s blog hasn’t been updated since April, it’s Press Room since early May, and the most recent content about from the film from the producers seems to be a largely irrelevant celebration of their victory in the fair use case against Yoko Ono.

But some people have apparently been receiving word that the producers want to stage a theatrical comeback of sorts. Various emails and other messages have been appearing over the last week purporting to be from Motive Entertainment, Expelled’s marketing/PR firm, and all are calling on supporters to help lobby the film back onto multiplexes around the country. From one such:

I am in charge of the re-release of our film Expelled…The goal is to gain 1,000 new theaters to release the film….over the summer…We are booking new theaters now…

The caveat is that we need at least one group of 250-300 to support the film with a verbal commitment and then tell me personally what theater is preferred and I will see to it that theater get the film at once…

If this little whisper campaign is legitimate (and I’m still a little skeptical at this point on that score), it’s simply more evidence that the film failed to have the cultural and financial impact that the producers had once hoped. And that, flustered and confused by the lack of impact, they’re trying to find some way to implement a small-scale do-over.

Still, as I said, I’m skeptical. While the name noted in the story, Tripp Thorton, appears to be a real employee of Motive, the email included doesn’t seem to be their corporate domain. And, unless I managed to stare straight at it without seeing, Motive’s website no longer mentions Expelled in any of the places you’d expect.

The only thing that strikes me as really plausible about the messages is that they appeared just after the film’s producers won their lawsuit against Ono, thus freeing them from the injunction that may have hindered previous efforts to expand the film’s distribution.

Other than that, no one seems to be talking so far, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Unless we do see some miraculous return from obscurity in the theaters, it won’t be until the DVD release, along with the inevitably maddening extras, that there will be much more to say.

Update: On her handful of redundant, self-plagiarizing pro-ID blogs, Denyse O’Leary keeps referring to a “surprise or two in store for Americans.” Could she be referring to something like the above?