Sci-fi author Orson Scott Card may not be facing any bleak post-apocalyptic financial future even if a boycott of the "Ender's Game" movie takes hold over his homophobic preaching.
Card signed away movie rights years ago and won't be earning anything additional on the backend of the film based on his landmark 1985 novel that opens Friday, sources told The Wrap.
For all of Card's body of science fiction work, his most famous - or infamous - writing may be the 2009 essay he penned for the Mormon Times, in which stated a spate of court decisions in California and Massachusetts at the time recognizing same-sex marriage "marks the end of democracy in America.
"Only when the marriage of heterosexuals has the support of the whole society can we have our best hope of raising each new generation to aspire to continue our civilization."
Nihonjoe via Wikimedia Commons
Orson Scott Card, pictured at the Brigham Young Symposium in Provo, Utah in 2008, has incited a backlash over his comments condemning gay marriage.
The movie has galvanized some marriage equality advocates to attempt a boycott. The group Geeks OUT has collected 11,000 pledges on MoveOn.org from moviegoers promising to skip the movie. And the bad press alone could put a dent on the box office.
The threat of a battle outside the multiplex has spurred the card-carrying board member of the National Organization for Marriage to break his silence on the issue in July to Entertainment Weekly.
"Ender's Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984," the 62-year-old writer said in the statement to the pop culture magazine.
"With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot... now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute."
RICHARD FOREMAN JR/ Summit Entertainment
Harrison Ford returns to space in ‘Ender’s Game.’
The filmmakers and cast have desperately been trying to distance the movie from Card's controversial politics.
Director Gavin Hood finds the threatened boycott told the Advocate Magazine in July that he finds the threatened boycott of his movie over the anti-gay marriage preaching of author Orson Scott Card "dreadfully ironic" given the themes of the story.
"Orson wrote a book about compassion, and empathy, and yet he himself is struggling to see that his position in real life is really at odds with his art," Hood told the Advocate, adding that Ender's story itself is an inclusive one.
"For me, it is so ironic that the writer of the work that has helped so many people, gay and straight, to find empowerment, to feel empowered, to find their own moral compass - it's very sad that he, himself, is struggling with these issues.
As The Wrap points out, however, Card does stand to pad his coffers from sales of the movie tie-in re-release of his novel.
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