ANTI-GAY AUTHOR’S FILM NO 1

Despite calls for a boycott of the blockbuster Ender’s Game, the sci-fi film topped the US box-office chart over the weekend.

Earlier this year, gay sci-fi fan group Geeks OUT launched a campaign urging the LGBT community and its friends to not support the movie, based on the book by anti-gay author Orson Scott Card.

Card, who has said that he backs the criminalisation of homosexuality and opposes same-sex marriage, wrote the bestselling book in 1984.

A practicing Mormon, he also sits on the board of the National Organisation for Marriage, which was created to lobby against gay marriage in the US.

Over the weekend, Ender’s Game, directed by South African Gavin Hood and starring Harrison Ford, took in over $27 million in ticket sales.

Geeks OUT said on its Facebook page that it believes that its campaign “with the simple purpose of raising awareness about Orson Scott Card’s hateful activism was truly a success, with the majority of articles mentioning the author’s vitriol against the LGBT community”.

It also noted that analysts have commented that while Ender’s Game’s – which cost $110 million to make – sold enough tickets to take it to the number one spot, it made less than its producers may have hoped for.

Its box-office debut was in the same range as another recent sci-fi flick, After Earth, starring Will Smith, which was ultimately viewed as a flop.

In the weeks preceding Ender’s Game’s release, its producers, Hood and Ford made it clear that they are opposed to Card’s anti-gay views and that his homophobic stance plays no part in the film’s story.

The film is set to be released in South Africa on December 6.