Joe Knopp, producer of the film Unplanned — a biopic of former Planned Parenthood abortion clinic director Abby Johnson’s philosophical change on abortion — told Breitbart News that supporters of lawful access to abortion are distressed by his film’s message and impact.
Knopp joined Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Rick Manning to discuss Unplanned.
Mansour invited Knopp’s response to a left-wing film critic at the Cut who wrote a review of Unplanned entitled “Unplanned Is a Movie That Could Get Someone Killed.”
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“It is silly when you hear some of the attempts that they’re making,” said Knopp. “I read the article that you’re referring tom and if you watch the film, there’s no violence except the violence against the babies that are killed.”
Knopp added, “When you have success — and it kind of makes some of these traditional Hollywood movies not look so good because our little small-budget film is beating out some of the movies they have spent five to ten times more to make, and everyone’s talking about this movie — it’s offensive to the other side.”
Knopp concluded, “Some of it is they just don’t get it. They don’t get why people are so concerned about the babies, so they are pulling out all the stops they can to try to oppose it, but like you said earlier, the more they talk about it — I almost hate to tell the secret — the more people are going to be intrigued to go see it and support the cause.”
Last week, Google derided the film with a “propaganda” label on its search engine, subsequently apologizing and removing the “propaganda” tag.
Knopp recalled Twitter’s suspension of Unplanned‘s official account during its box office opening weekend, later reversing its decision.
“Word of mouth [on social media] on opening weekend is everything for a movie, especially one of our size,” explained Knopp. “So the movie comes out Friday night and by Saturday morning at around 9:30 or Twitter account gets shut down, which is the most rapid way of communicating in today’s world, and it was down for an hour, and hour and a half — we were not getting a good explanation — and it took about 24 hours for it to recover properly, because the second day we had an issue with losing people who were trying to follow us … So it was very frustrating and a distraction for us during opening weekend which is a very crucial time for us.”
Unplanned was given an R-rating by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), citing “some disturbing, bloody images.” Knopp described the negative impact of this rating on the film’s producers’ advertising options.
“We weren’t able to get ad space on any of the traditional movie channels,” stated Knopp. “Even some radio stations who are traditionally friendly to all of our movies were not willing to play ads for us.”
Box Office Mojo had Unplanned as the fourth highest-grossing film on its opening weekend of April 5 – 7.
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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