Apparently gluttons for more movie critic punishment, the producers of the first Atlas Shrugged movie have announced that production on Part Two will begin in the spring.
John Aglialoro, who independently produced and funded the first movie to the tune of $20 million, and Harmon Kaslow, another producer, announced that they would begin principal photography on the sequel in April, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Ever attentive to timing, Aglialoro and Kaslow said they chose to announce the movie on what would have been Ayn Rand’s 107th birthday and are shooting to release it this October, right before the presidential election.
According to the Reporter, “for Part 2, [the producers] have brought on Duncan Scott, who produced We The Living in 1986, a three-hour long foreign film also based on a Rand novel.”
The first movie, which was championed by Tea Party groups like Freedomworks, was released on Tax Day last April. It’s based on Rand’s 1957 novel of the same name, and was originally intended to be the first of a trilogy. Things were looking pretty grim though after the movie was almost universally panned by critics, and earned a paltry $4.6 million at the box office.
The movie, like the book, is set in a dystopian America where capitalism is under attack and the best and brightest members of society are snatched away into the night. Freedomworks and other Tea Party groups were hoping that the movie — which emphasizes self-reliance and hard work and features lines like “You’d be surprised how quickly things get done when you do some actual work and don’t rely on political favors” — would help galvanize supporters and broaden the base.
Read TPM’s review of the first movie here.
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