I've seen things down in the tunnels. A rat who dragged a whole bagel 40 feet only to find out it was a hockey puck. A pigeon who spent a week guarding an empty chip bag. But I had never seen a four-hour takedown of the world's richest man lose a fight to an empty theater.

Here's the case file. Director Alex Gibney's documentary "Musk" opened on October 9 in four theaters in New York and Los Angeles. It ran 225 minutes, according to The Numbers. That's three hours and 45 minutes. You could fly from New York to Miami in that time, and the flight attendant would be nicer to you.

The opening was respectable. Then distributor Bleecker Street expanded it to 472 theaters on October 16. The audience did not expand with it.

According to box office data from The Numbers, on Wednesday, October 22, "Musk" played on all 472 screens and averaged $67 per theater for the day. Sixty-seven dollars. That's not an audience. That's a family of four with large popcorn and one guy who came in to use the bathroom.

By Thursday, October 23, it was down to 63 theaters. Industry site Showbiz411 reported the film was "gone from almost every theater in America," and Gizmodo, which raised questions about that report, still called the wide release "an unmitigated flop." Total domestic gross through Thursday: $588,478, per The Numbers.

Let's do some tunnel math. The documentary was made to explain why Elon Musk is too rich. It then pulled in $67 a screen on a Wednesday. The man it was about makes that while sneezing.

Musk himself called it a "fake documentary hit piece" that "utterly failed" in a post on X. I've been in the business of rooting through trash a long time, and I'll say this much for him: he's at least half right, and the half that's right made $67 on a Wednesday.

Critics, to be fair, loved it. Showbiz411 said it had almost perfect scores on Rotten Tomatoes. So the people paid to watch it liked it, and the people asked to pay for it went home. That's the whole modern Hollywood business model in one sentence.

And look at what they were asking. Picture a guy in Ohio. Gas is still too high, the kids want Halloween costumes that cost more than his first car payment, and the multiplex is offering him a three-hour-45-minute lecture about a rich man, at night, on a weekday. He chose literally anything else. He chose the dishes.

Here's the part that sent me deeper with the flashlight. The film is headed for digital and streaming release, according to reports. So the people who made a four-hour movie nobody would leave the house for have decided the solution is to bring it to your house. That's not distribution. That's a home invasion with a runtime.

Down here in the tunnels, we've got a rule about long investigations. If your case file is longer than the crime, nobody's coming to the trial. Gibney made a movie about a man who launches rockets, and it still couldn't get off the ground.

The Demorat is a satire publication. This article is parody and commentary based on publicly reported events. Quotes from real people are as reported; everything else is a joke.

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