Are the good times over for Michael Moore?  Have the ticket-buyers finally sickened of the director of Sicko?  Sure looks that way, based on what Variety is reporting.

The films of Michael Moore have been faltering at the box office for several years now.  This weekend, though, the lackluster performance of his latest truth-to-power opus, "Fahrenheit 11/9," was notably dramatic, if not downright stark.

Moore made more than $100 million for his Fahrenheit 9/11 ten years ago.  Today, he's making only a tenth of that for his same-old, same-old left-wing tropism.

Apparently, he isn't saying anything new, and even the lefties have abandoned him.

That was evident enough in the failed film festival he put on in Traverse City, Michigan late last summer.  Moore was roundly criticized for failing to pay the tradesmen and then boorishly insulting them for their hard work, something that disgusted even the lefty press, such as the Daily Beast.

His failing film ventures raise the possibility that it wasn't just pure meanness, let alone Moore's questionable claim of poor service that was driving this – he's probably running out of money.  Neither his film festival nor his actual films are generating any success.

Apparently, the lefties have grown tired of him, and even they want to be entertained with something new, but Moore is offering the same old stuff.  Variety's Owen Gleiberman argues:

Yet let's be brutally honest, since the Michael Moore I know would insist on nothing less.  When a documentary filmmaker, for most of three decades, has been defined by his ability to stir up national political debate and even drive it, and to present himself as that all too rare thing in American life, an uncompromising mainstream muckraker, it's meaningful when his popularity and influence begin to erode.  It means that even if he hasn't changed, his relationship with the public has.

Gleiberman gives good technical reasons, such as the internet, the nonstop news cycle, and the aging of his audience, but the sum reason of this is that Moore hasn't said or done anything new, and his latest documentaries are unstructured mishmashes, not focused pieces dealing with single issues the press isn't touching.

I think the problem is that he's offering up the same-old, same-old, and increasingly ideological doses.  His work has long ceased to be about arcane parts of Americana that coastal audiences otherwise know nothing about, such as the auto industry, and is now just a soapbox for left-wing yelling.  Well, lefties get that just by going to their breakfast tables or barstools; there's nothing new there.  They can get that right there at home.

No wonder his audience has fled. He's gotten boring because he's stopped listening to anything but the voices in his own head.  With success, he is no doubt surrounded by a lot of courtiers and flatterers who tell him only things he wants to hear.  The Variety writer rightly suggests that maybe Moore needs to get out for a while and seriously visit Trump country and talk to Trump voters, given that he correctly called the election.  He might listen and put together something credible about why Trump matters.  In short, do real documentary journalism, which is supposedly his specialty, that thing that made him get famous in the first place.  Salena Zito has already snagged most of the material on that, but there is no reason why he couldn't try.  It's unlikely he will, because that might involve enraging lefties, given that they love living in their coastal bubbles and writing off half the country as dregs and deplorables.

It leaves Moore with a dilemma: make money, or make more failed left-wing movies?  Up to him.  Perhaps he should consult with Dinesh D'Souza.

As for the rest of us, good riddance: we are sick of his lies, glad to see that lies aren't selling as they used to. 

Image credit: Brother87 via Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.