O.C. Market Has Been No. 3 in Nation

Far though it may be from the battlefields of the Civil War, Orange County has managed to play a big role in the unexpected success story of “Gettysburg.”

The Edwards South Coast Plaza movie theater, where the 4-hour, 18-minute epic played for seven weeks before closing Tuesday to make way for “Mrs. Doubtfire,” was the film’s highest-grossing venue in the Los Angeles area, according to Al Shapiro, executive vice president of New Line Pictures, the movie’s distributor.

Beyond that, Shapiro said, Orange County has been the No. 3 market for the movie in the nation, behind Washington, D.C., and Gettysburg itself. In the last weekend of what he termed its “remarkable run” at Edwards South Coast Plaza, “Gettysburg” grossed $3,849, contrasted with the national average of $1,860. (A one-week run at the Edwards Franciscan Plaza theater in San Juan Capistrano was less successful, pulling in $1,133 last weekend.)

The movie is now in its sixth week at Cinemapolis in Anaheim, where it also is drawing better than expected, “doing quite well, considering it’s only doing two shows a day,” a spokeswoman for the theater said. Most films can be shown four or five times in a day.

“I think that Orange County is the true family area of Southern California. People are into history,” said Shapiro, when asked to explain the film’s success here.

“After all, Lincoln was a Republican, wasn’t he?”