Has Julian Assange successfully hijacked The Fifth Estate? Trailer: The Fifth Estate A fictionalised inside look at Wikileaks, based in part on a book by Julian Assange's former right-hand man. PT2M37S http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/action/externalEmbeddedPlayer?id=d-2q5hn 620 349 July 18, 2013 He didn't win a seat in the Australian Senate, he hasn't quite brought an end to the surveillance state, and he looks set to be confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for a long time yet. But on one front at least Julian Assange can feel pretty satisfied: his campaign to turn people off The Fifth Estate appears to be working. On its opening weekend in the US, the film took just $1.7 million on 1769 screens - an average of less than $1000 per screen. In the UK, where it opened a week earlier, it took a little over $800,000 on 411 screens in its opening four days, a slightly better but still underwhelming result. The US result was, according to Entertainment Weekly, "truly awful ... the worst debut for a film opening in at least 1500 theatres this year." The UK result was, in the words of Screen Daily, "one of the softest openings for director Bill Condon in the UK." Where there's a will ... WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Condon's past work includes high-end dramas Gods and Monsters and Kinsey, Academy Award-winning musical Dreamgirls and the final two instalments in the blockbuster Twilight series. The Fifth Estate is based on two books, including one by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who was Assange's right-hand man in the organisation before they had an acrimonious split in September 2010. Assange has been campaigning against the film since word of it first surfaced in March 2011. "This is how bullshit ends up being history," the WikiLeaks' Twitter feed responded to news that Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks planned to make a film based on two books about the organisation. Spielberg lines up WikiLeaks film based on books by opportunists. Following the film's world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the campaign really kicked into gear. Star Cumberbatch revealed that Assange had begged him via email not to do the film. It was a very brief exchange where he said, 'I urge you as an actor not to do this film; it's based on two antithetical accounts that I find poisonous and potentially damaging to my situation and the organisation'. In response, Cumberbatch said: "I wrote [to Assange] trying to justify why I thought it was important to bring this version of events to the world and how it wasn't as negative a spin as he feared it would be, and [saying] that I would try to do it with the utmost integrity, to portray something of the three-dimensionality of the situation as well as him." That didn't wash with the Australian, who is resisting Swedish attempts to extradite him to face sex charges, on the grounds that the move is merely a cover for US attempts to put him on trial for espionage over leaked US defence documents and diplomatic cables. On September 18, Wikileaks published the full screenplay of The Fifth Estate, along with notes outlining the organisation's objections to it (including the claim that the authors of the books on which it was based "had an interest in portraying Julian Assange as dishonest or manipulative for competitive, personal and legal reasons) ." Wikileaks had employed a similar tactic in May, when it released an annotated transcript of Alex Gibney's documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks. Critics rightly pointed out, however, that this version of the script - apparently transcribed from an audio recording of the film - made no reference to the emails sent by Bradley Manning, presumably because they appear in the film as text only; whatever the explanation, it was a significant omission. On October 9, Assange published the full text of his letter to Cumberbatch on the Wikileaks website ("I believe you are a good person, but I do not believe that this film is a good film. I do not believe it is going to be positive for me or the people I care about. I believe that it is going to be overwhelmingly negative for me and the people I care about"). There have been many attempts to parlay the story of Julian Assange and Wikileaks into fodder for the screen, big and small. Some of them - such as Robert Connolly's Underground - have received the subject's blessing, but The Fifth Estate is one of the many that have not. But there is one other new Wikileaks project that is unlikely to incur the wrath of the white-haired cyber activist: Mediastan. This documentary, released online earlier this month on a pay-per-view basis, follows the attempts of a group of Wikileaks operatives to persuade media organisations in Central Asia to publish the secret US diplomatic cables the organisation had unearthed. It is, according to the film's IMDb page, " a journey from Afghanistan to Manhattan, through the boundaries of freedom of speech" that ventures "into the minds of those who shape our understanding of the world." Its producer is one Julian Paul Assange.