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By PATRICK GAVIN | 10/12/11 1:18 PM EDT

In March, POLITICO told you about the new movie, “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1,” based on the Ayn Rand novel that has enjoyed a resurgence in political circles thanks to the tea party’s embrace of its exploration of limited government power and individual freedom.

Given its mild marketing and theater screenings, “Atlas” box office performance was lukewarm: It did $1.7 million on its opening weekend on 300 theaters, for $5,600 per screen. (Its second weekend was even less successful.)

But the folks behind the movie were undeterred and are moving forward with a second installment of “Atlas.”

Harmon Kaslow, who produced “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1” along with John Aglialoro,told POLITICO that “Part 2,” which will cover roughly the second third of the novel, will soon get under way. And the hope is that it will be bigger and better.

First, it’ll be longer.

“Right now, it’ll probably be 30 to 40 minutes longer than the first movie. The first one was about an hour and a half and a lot of those faithful to the book said they really wished we would have given them more out of the book. … We’re going to slow things down a little bit and let people enjoy what they experienced in the book, in the theater.”

Then, there’s the new cast. Part 1’s journey to the screen included a long history of production changes that at various points included talk of casting A-listers such as Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron and Brad Pitt, but the final product featured a more modest cast (Taylor Schilling, Grant Bowler, Matthew Marsden, Graham Beckel and Rebecca Wisocky). Kaslow is realistic about what he can afford, but said, “We’re going to aspire to get the biggest names that we possibly can” while also being faithful to the book’s characters and who’s best for those roles. Some of the new actors will step into roles played by others in Part 1.

And they’re hoping to have a bigger budget. “We’re going to spend more money on it than we did the first one,” Kaslow said. “We’re stepping it up on ‘Part 2’ with a substantially greater budget for advertising.” Kaslow said he thinks the first movie could have done “significantly better” but also has a glass half-full perspective on things.

“Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts do a film in the $4,900 per theater range and nobody batted an eye. But ‘Atlas Shrugged’ did over $5,000 and it’s a ‘failure’ and so on and so forth. We don’t subscribe to that. … We probably spent less than 1 percent of what a studio spends on marketing a film. If you look at all of these factors, our assessment is that it was very successful.”

Key to that success was the tea party’s embrace of the movie, and although Kaslow is clear that tea party types are a key part of the audience (“If you look at Ayn Rand’s core message, it really revolves around respect the rights of the individual and that’s really where the connection is with groups like the tea party and that’s what we’ll be focusing on”), he also hopes to avoid being pigeonholed.

“We’re not going to change the message of the book simply because one or more political or activist groups have found a connection with the message of the book. To the extent that these type of groups embrace it, we welcome their support, but we’re not going to go and actively solicit it.”

Kaslow said he hopes to start production in early 2012, “with hopes of previewing it around the time of the nominating conventions.”

via New ‘Atlas Shrugged’ film on the way – Patrick Gavin – POLITICO.com.