There is no way around it, Dinesh D'Souza's film 2016: Obama's America is an out and out box office smash. Now playing in more than 2000 theaters, it has become the second most successful documentary film of all time.

"The product is selling because people sense there is real information here," D'Souza told the Guardian. "Not allegations, not assertions, but real information that is valuable in assessing the future of the country."

Nikki Finke, Editor-in Chief of Deadline Hollywood, recently observed that, "2016 Obama's America grossed $26.2M by end of [this past weekend] (give or take some bucks) and passed [four] of Michael Moore's five political documentaries to become the #2 all-time biggest." Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 still leads the pack by a large margin.

2016: Obama's America has now made more money than Moore's Sicko (2007 - $24.5M), Oscar-winner Bowling For Columbine (2002 - $21.5M), and Capitalism: A Love Story (2009 - $14.3M).

According to Finke, 2016 Obama's America produced by Gerald R. Molen "who in fact credits `learning some lessons' from Moore. `When he released Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 ahead of the election, it sparked intense debate.'"

2016 Obama's America is co-directed by D'Souza, a longtime conservative activist and currently president of the Christian liberal arts school The King's College, and John Sullivan, and produced by Academy Award winner Molen (co-producer of Schindler's List).

According to The Guardian's Rory Carroll, the film "was shot on a shoestring budget, edited in Oklahoma City and distributed independently. `They're a little unnerved because we kind of came out of nowhere. It shows that Hollywood has no monopoly on the making and distribution of good films," D'Souza said.

"He shrugged off criticism that it was funded by rich conservatives. `My answer is: well, we tried to be funded by poor conservatives, but that failed, so we had to turn to the rich ones. Big deal. Who cares?'"

The Rocky Mountain Pictures film, which was shown at the Republican National Convention, is apparently doing extremely well in the battleground states of Florida, Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, Georgia, Illinois, and Arizona, where both President Obama and the GOP's Mitt Romney are devoting much of their campaigning energy.

Former San Francisco Mayor and longtime state legislator, Willie Brown, writes "Willie's World," a weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle. In addition to Brown's mostly astute political observations, he checks in with a few graphs covering the movies he's seen in the previous week. This week, among others, Brown took in the D'Souza's doc:

"The basic premise here is that Obama is a psychological wreck because he was raised without a father. It doesn't work on any level -- it's not a good documentary, and it's a dreary excuse for entertainment. You'd expect it to be a tough sell around here, and you'd be right. There were probably 20 people in the theater for the 7:30 show."

To Brown's surprise, according to Deadline Hollywood, 2016 is also drawing big audiences in New York and California.  

Melvyn L. Fein Ph.D. a professor of Sociology at Kennesaw State University saw the film at his local Georgia multiplex, and reported in The Marietta Daily Journal that he couldn't "remember a movie theater that was more crowded. ...  [with] almost every seat ... filled,... Then, after the film began, the mostly middle aged audience paid rapt attention. Nary a sound could be heard as this riveting testimonial to one man's vision unfolded."

Critics savage savvily marketed film

The film's "success was aided by savvy marketing: exhibitors were reporting busloads arriving at theaters around the country in pre-organized trips. It also employed much of the same selling techniques used to garner attention and support for faith-based films, understandable since the audience is overlapping. Its campaign included advertising nationally on talk radio and cable news channels including Fox News Channel, A&E, History and MSNBC," Hollywood Deadline's Finke reported.

As many have pointed out, film critics have savaged the film: The New Yorker's Richard Brody thoughtfully pointed out that while the film was "a work of propaganda that offers base innuendo in lieu of argument," there were  "parts of it that are authentically engaging and account for its slender cinematic appeal [and] likely have as much to do with the film's popularity as its anti-Obama message does."

Brody noted that, "They're also inseparable from the film's most scurrilous insinuations. It's the kind of personal production that calls into question the very virtue of sincerity: I'd think better of its master-thinker and preëminent presence, ... D'Souza ... if the movie gave cause to believe that he was merely mouthing a prepared campaign line rather than expressing his actual viewpoints. But his representation of ingenuous sincerity -- the perversion and distortion of the notion of a personal movie -- is the film's starting point and the governing concept of its structure."

D'Souza slams Michael Moore

2016: Obama's America has become an enormous box office success. D'Souza gushed to The Daily Beast's Meghan McCain that he was "surprised and thrilled" by the movie's success. "We've quickly become the leading conservative movie of all time, and [we are now] ... the second most successful political documentary of all time, just behind Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11" (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/04/meghan-mccain-ta lks-to-2016-obama-s-america-director-dinesh-d-souza.html).

D'Souza, feeling his oats, told McCain that being compared to Michael Moore was "almost an insult": "Michael Moore is a creative, entertaining, and ridiculous figure. I admire his entrepreneurship. I admire the fact that he knows how to pack a punch. But when you combine the sleight of hand, the manipulation of facts, the ignoring of facts, intellectually, it's a disgrace. I'm a college president. If I were at the intellectual level of Michael Moore, this movie would be a dud."

McCain asked if he thought he was "smarter than Michael Moore?" He pointed out that saying he was smarter than Moore was "like saying I'm smarter than Mike Tyson. Yes, I am saying that, but I'm saying more than that. I'm saying I made an intelligent film and he hasn't."

Whether the film does anything more politically than shore up Mitt Romney's base remains to be seen. What is probably the most predictable outcome of 2016: Obama's America, it that Dinesh D'Souza is more than likely to continue making films.