When Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” hit theaters in 2004 and proved that, yes, a political movie could score $120 million at the box office, the cinematic landscape changed.

In the four years since, Hollywood has been trying to repeat that success. And it’s not working.

Sure, there have been modestly successful politico movies in the past few years: the labyrinthine “Syriana,” Al Gore’s global warming doc “An Inconvenient Truth,” Michael Moore’s “Sicko,” the “South Park” guys’ puppet movie “Team America” and “Charlie Wilson’s War,” which didn’t break $70 million even with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts on the marquee.

But for every wee hit, there have been several big bombs: “In the Valley of Elah,” “The Kingdom,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Rendition,” “Stop-Loss” and “War, Inc.,” to name a few.

Even the recent “Body of Lies,” with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe in the leads, foundered at the box office and was trounced by a talking chihuahua. So was Oliver Stone’s “W.,” which opened last weekend.

Bill Maher’s antifaith documentary “Religulous” might be the closest to a success this year. At $9 million domestic gross so far, it’s already the fifth-highest-grossing political documentary and ninth-highest-grossing documentary of all-time.

Most political documentaries get seen by relatively no one. The Iraq-War-themed docs “No End in Sight,” “Taxi to the Dark Side” and “Standard Operating Procedure” haven’t grossed more than $2 million together, despite unanimous critical acclaim.

So why can’t modern political movies match the box office gold of “Fahrenheit 9/11”? Why are people not seeing political movies?

Exhaustion, perhaps. Why buy an $8 movie ticket for something you can get bombarded with for free at home?

“My thought on this is that ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ was so timely and was successful because it came out at a certain historical moment,” said Gerise Herndon, a professor who teaches international cinema at Nebraska Wesleyan.

“Then, people felt more of an urgency about the Iraq war. My feeling is that people don’t feel that same sense of urgency. Now, it’s more of an impatience or exhaustion.”

Whether we see another “Fahrenheit 9/11”-sized hit in this decade is anybody’s guess.

In the meantime, the talking-dog movie is king.

- Micah Mertes

Despite buzz, 'W.' is fourth at box office - to no one's surprise

The hype machine was in overdrive last week for “W.”

Web sites such as Politico.com, which usually don’t touch entertainment, ran pieces on Oliver Stone’s bio-pic about President George W. Bush. The mainstream media was full of coverage of the film, and star Josh Brolin hosted “Saturday Night Live,” with Stone plugging the movie through a cameo.

Despite all that noise, “W.” wound up in fourth place at the box office over the weekend, trailing “Max Payne,” a video game-based movie; “Beverly Hills Chihuahua,” the family hit of the fall; and “The Secret Lives of Bees,” the adaptation of the best-selling novel.

“W.” took in $10.6 million. “Max Payne” made $18 million.

“For me, an Oliver Stone film about George Bush doesn’t necessarily scream big box office,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers, in an Associated Press story. “A film like this is very tough to gauge, but this is exactly what I thought it would do.”

Lionsgate, the studio that released “W.,” polled the opening weekend audience. It found that 55 percent of “W.” viewers called themselves liberals, 31 percent identified themselves as moderates, and 14 percent said they were conservative.

Such is the nature of political films, which, by and large, end up preaching to the converted.

But the self-described liberals who came to theaters expecting the Bush bashing implied by the trailers likely were surprised. The film is surprisingly even-handed and isn’t a hatchet job or some kind of wild conspiracy theory as some expected from Stone.

In fact, Bush comes off as a near tragic figure, a man who failed at everything he tried to do in life while struggling to live up to the expectations of his patrician father.

That’s not to say the film doesn’t cast a critical eye on Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the rest of the administration. But Josh Brolin’s Oscar-caliber performance as Bush takes him beyond caricature into a deeper, more realistic realm.

“W.” isn’t one of Stone’s most compelling films. In part, that can be attributed to its structure, which flashes back and forth between the Bush White House and Bush’s formative years at Yale, in west Texas and running the Texas Rangers baseball team.

But it’s also because political junkies — the film’s core audience — already know much of what is going to be seen.

Stone made “W.” in under a year, with filming starting in May. The five-month turnaround is blazingly fast by Hollywood standards and was done to get the movie into theaters before the Nov. 4 election.

The implication there is that “W.” could have some effect on voters, and it’s backed by the notion that people are more interested in politics now and might turn out to see a movie about Bush. Putting the film out in January, the other option, would doom it to irrelevance.

It’s not likely that “W.” or any other movie can have much of an effect on an election. Only a few million people will see the movie in the 2½ weeks between its release and Election Day. And most of those have already made up their minds about who they’re going to vote for — and it probably isn’t John McCain.

- L. Kent Wolgamott