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If you feel like you’re going to watch Evan Almighty, and you don’t want to know any more about it that you don’t already know from the preview, stop here. But you’re not going to watch Evan Almighty, are you.

Deadline Hollywood – MORE SEQUEL SICKNESS: ‘Evan Almighty’ Debuts Weak Friday

The Tom Shadyac-directed pic will be hard-pressed to make it to $100 mil domestic this summer despite its runaway cost of $210 mil. (Universal insists the final budget came in at $175 mil.) The pic’s business was strongest in the South and Mid-West, average in the West Coast and Mountain regions, and softest in the East and Canada. This bears out the studio’s feelings that the movie’s religious theme would play best in America’s heartland. All along, tracking scores for “Unaided Awareness” had been too low. And even with the book and toilet jokes removed, parents didn’t want to take their kids to a sequel based on a movie they felt was too mature.

That would be Bruce Almighty. I didn’t see it, and if I hadn’t just read that Jim Carrey’s in it, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you a thing about it. Having read that Jim Carrey’s in it, I can tell you that Jim Carrey’s in it.

So, apparently Evan Almighty is a movie about God and religion, designed for America’s heartland, which is only underperforming because people associate it with a Jim Carrey movie from four years ago which was too mature for their little Christian kids.

The Corner – A $200 Million Comedy About Evil Republicans, by John Podhoretz

The new Steve Carell movie, Evan Almighty, opens next week. This sequel to Jim Carrey’s Bruce Almighty made headlines because it is, by far, the most expensive comedy ever made, approaching $200 million in production costs (and probably another $50 million in marketing costs). That’s a lot of money. A movie like that needs a very broad-based appeal. Probably not the best idea to spend that kind of money on a movie that basically writes off and insults the political views of one-third of the United States. Right?

So what’s it about? A friend of Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells reports that it’s “it’s basically a pro-environment rip on the Republicans”:

Freeman’s God calls upon Carell’s Congressman to build the ark to prepare for the big rains on September 22nd. And then the rains come and then…perhaps I shouldn’t say. Suffice that the real focus of this film isn’t God’s wrath but Man’s greed. It turns out there’s been a man-made dambreak that causes this gigantic flood, and it’s mainly the fault of a pro-business Congressman played by John Goodman who’s been helping his fat-cat pallies buy lots of land in parks and then winking at their short-cut moves (i.e., not building a dam properly).

Variety’s Anne Thompson, who probably knows as much about Christian messages in the heartland as Howard Dean did, writes: “Director Tom Shadyac and writer Steve Oederkerk’s old-school Christian message will play well in America’s heartland.”

Perhaps.

Uh huh.