“Gosnell,” the abortion story that Hollywood did not want Americans to hear, is the No. 1 best-selling drama DVD on Amazon this week.
The film, which does not come out on DVD until Feb. 5, already ranks at the top in online pre-sales, taking the No. 1 spot for drama DVDs and the No. 3 spot for overall DVD sales on Amazon, the Daily Wire first observed.
“Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer” is based on the true story of Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortionist who murdered newborn babies and committed numerous other crimes inside his “house of horrors” abortion facility. It stars Dean Cain (“Lois & Clark”) and is directed by Nick Searcy (“The Shape of Water,” “Justified”).
The film has been a long time coming. Four years ago, the struggles began when the crowdfunding site Kickstarter refused to allow producers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney to fundraiser there. They later broke a crowdfunding record on Indiegogo. Searcy said they finished the film two years ago but struggled to find a distributor. Last year, two prominent media outlets – NPR and Facebook — refused to run their ads for the film.
Despite these struggles, the film ranked in the top 10 at the box office when it came out in October.
“One of last year’s most controversial movies has made history with record-breaking DVD pre-sales on Amazon – topping the best-seller list and overtaking big studio-backed films,” the film’s marketing team told The Daily Wire earlier this week.
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Here’s more from the report:
Producer Phelim McAleer said in a statement that the film’s presale success on Amazon provides a solid indication that people are hungry to learn about the truth. “There is an enormous appetite for this kind of film that tells the truth,” he said. “People are fed up with being fed movies that attack their values and misrepresent the world. There is a real hunger for Gosnell and our record breaking sales prove this.”
… The film grossed $3.6 million during its theatrical run on a production budget of $2.4 million that was spearheaded by a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign.
The film and its subject, abortionist Kermit Gosnell, have been largely ignored by the mainstream media for years. In 2013, a jury convicted Gosnell of murdering three newborn babies and contributing to the death of a female patient, along with numerous other crimes. He was sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison.
McAleer previously told LifeNews that, despite the grisly, horrific nature of the case, what astounded him the most was the lack of a media presence at Gosnell’s trial. “This is one of the biggest stories I’ve ever seen, I’ve ever heard about, and there was no coverage at all,” he said.
After Gosnell’s trial concluded, McAleer and his wife, fellow journalist and documentarian Ann McElhinney, decided to take matters into their own hands.
“I just assumed then once he [Gosnell] was convicted, that there was going to be a mega movie, because why wouldn’t you make a movie out of this?” McAleer said. “So I waited and waited and I realized, wow, no one’s making a movie out of this? That’s because they don’t want—Hollywood doesn’t want to touch this story or cover this story. So, if they’re not going to do it, then I should do it. We’ve done this before; we’ve been telling stories all of our lives. We’ll just make a movie, and we did.”
Once the idea was set, the next major task was to allocate money to make the film. McAleer decided to crowdfund, a strategy he has used for previous films. He and his wife initially went to Kickstarter to fundraise, but they faced censorship on that site.
“Kickstarter said ‘yeah, you can [fundraise] here, but you have to change the description of your project,” McAleer said.
McAleer was asked to remove terms like “murder,” “murdering babies,” and “stabbing babies” from the description of their project, because the words were deemed offensive to Kickstarter’s community values. Gosnell was, in fact, convicted of murdering three newborn babies, and witnesses who testified at the trial said he killed them by stabbing the backs of the babies’ necks with scissors.
McAleer and McElhinney pulled out of Kickstarter and proceeded to fundraise at Indiegogo. Nearly 30,000 people raised $2.3 million in 45 days – a record for the website.
“No mainstream media has ever written a story on us. When they write nice puffy stories about crowdfunding, they seem to forget to include us. And you know, it’s a movie that exposes them, shows them off for the agenda-driven PACs that they are. Our movie is saying the things that they don’t want to talk about—the negative side of abortion and how the media covers things up,” he said.
“So Hollywood didn’t want to touch this film…You know Hollywood, they give themselves awards for bravery, but they’re not that brave,” McAleer said.
The film is rated PG-13. People may pre-order the film through Amazon.
