【Love Nonetheless】

LOS ANGELES -- Add "box office flop" to the pile of problems for The Love NonethelessBirth of a Nationand whatever awards prospects Nate Parker and Fox Searchlight may yet have harbored before the weekend.

Those hopes, however feeble, have flown.

As of Friday, the Sundance phenom-turned-cultural flashpoint had one last chance at redemption: Moviegoers, whose capacity for forgiveness -- or separation of art from artist at least -- could've put Nate Parker's movie back on track with a strong showing at the box office.

But the first step toward being forgiven is to show remorse and apologize, something to which Parker never fully committed. He walked up to the line, then took a defiant step back, even as Fox Searchlight upped its theater order from its Sundance point-of-purchase promise of 1,500 to something more like 2,100 locations.

The result: $7.1 million over the opening weekend, for an anemic per-theater average of just over $3,300, roughly what Deepwater Horizonhauled in for its second frame (though the Mark Wahlberg thriller about a significantly less important event in history did its business at a larger scale, for $11.7 million).

There is now no doubt that allegations of sexual assault dragged Nationunder. But something else happened along the way to this:

Birth of a Nation opening weekend at Sundance Sunset. (@kimmasters) pic.twitter.com/p401h0qD71

— Rebecca Goldstein (@becgo) October 8, 2016

Because it turns out that, all of its irreconcilable baggage aside, The Birth of a Nationjust wasn't a very good movie to begin with.

The film premiered in Park City, Utah, in January to a pair of thundering ovations -- one after the film, and one before it. That preemptive applause came less than two weeks after the Academy nominated 20 white people for acting honors, and here was the tonic, right there onstage, its writer, director and star, a dashing and impassioned young man whose personal sacrifice -- seven years of toil -- was the only narrative anyone wanted to tell.

A few days later, Nation'sRotten Tomatoes score soared to 94 percent, with 17 festival-going critics one-upping one another with staggering praise. (Even then, some journalists knew that Parker had a potential problem hiding in plain sight, but no one wrote a single word, or asked a single question about that 17-year-old case.)

Eight months went by before sister trade publications Deadlineand Varietywould see fit to blink first, sparking off a new narrative that would utterly consume Parker and The Birth of a Nation.Plans for a college campus barnstorming tour were scrapped. Press conferences turned prickly.

Meanwhile, Nationscreened and re-screened for a new batch of critics, now wholly unburdened by pressure to uphold the contagious euphoria surrounding it. Its Rotten Tomatoesscore eroded to 79 percent, Parker couldn't seem to get out of his own way and by the time Nationhit theaters, it's impossible to think anyone who bought a ticket didn't first have to reconcile their own feelings about supporting the film and filmmaker.

The last and final stop for the judgment of Nationwill be awards season -- but at $7.1 million, it's time to call that one, too.

Box office and awards performance share a tenuous and unreliable relationship; major sustained success can help a film like American Sniperor Avatar, while a poor showing will do little to dint Academy darlings like The Hurt Lockeror The Artist.

But Nationabsolutely needed this. It needed to be embraced at the box office, the film industry's version of the popular vote, in order to be looked at with fresh and sympathetic eyes by voting delegates within the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Instead, The Birth of a Nation-- the most expensive independent movie ever bought at Sundance at $17.5 million -- suffered a humiliating rejection.

Nominations? Not too likely. Wins? Forget it. That dream, which seemed like an inevitability back in January, is over now.