President Donald Trump took on one his most vocal celebrity critics Saturday in a message posted to his Twitter account, calling filmmaker Michael Moore’s anti-Trump summer Broadway show a “total bomb” that was “forced to close.”
“While not at all presidential I must point out that the Sloppy Michael Moore Show on Broadway was a TOTAL BOMB and was forced to close. Sad!” Trump tweeted Saturday evening about Moore’s show.
Trump was, of course, referring to Moore’s Broadway show The Terms of My Surrender, a play in which the filmmaker took aim at Trump and his policies and often brought out celebrity guests to help bash the president. The play opened in late summer and ran for twelve weeks at New York City’s Belasco Theater.
According to industry box office tracking at BroadwayWorld.com, Moore’s show grossed a total of $4.2 million during its run, or less than half of what it had the potential to make. Through its final seven weeks, the show managed to gross over 40 percent of its potential earnings just once, according to the site.
The show was also mostly panned by critics, with one Los Angeles Times reviewer calling it a “support group for disheartened Democrats,” and one in which Moore casts himself both as a “victim of the right” and a “champion of all mankind.”
Moore fired back at the president Saturday in a series of tweets, explaining that the show had always been intended to play as a limited engagement and saying at least one senior member of Trump’s White House was a fan of the filmmaker’s.
“You must have my smash hit of a Broadway show confused with your presidency- which IS a total bomb and WILL indeed close early. NOT SAD,” Moore wrote in the first of eleven messages.
Moore also suggested that Trump was using the play as his “latest distraction” from his “crimes,” and called the president a “loser.”
“For now, at least, I know I still have one fan in the White House (thx for your unwavering support Jared!)” he concluded his tweets.
In originally announcing the show, the documentary filmmaker said he wanted to see if a piece of theater “could raise enough of a ruckus to discombobulate a man sitting in the Oval Office.”
During one August performance, Moore took the audience that had come to see him that night on a pair of double-decker buses to a protest outside Trump Tower, where he was joined by celebrities including Mark Ruffalo and Olivia Wilde.
Moore told the audience at the protest that the group was there to perform a “citizen’s arrest.”
The filmmaker’s Broadway show closed this week. He has since announced his desire to take the show on tour across the country.
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum
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