Sales, a Film and the Cost of Setting a Date

The Late Great Planet Earth became a publishing phenomenon disproportionate to its origins as a paperback from a religious press. The New York Times called it the best selling nonfiction book of the 1970s in the United States, and reported sales climbed from roughly ten million copies by the end of that decade to more than twenty eight million by 1990 and over thirty five million by the century's end, in more than fifty translated languages. In January 1978 a documentary adaptation narrated by Orson Welles and directed by Rolf Forsberg and Robert Amram brought the book's argument to theaters; the Chicago critic Gene Siskel gave it one star, calling it a chance to pay to be told unconvincingly that the end is near, though the film still grossed nearly twenty million dollars.

The book's specific timetable did not hold. No Soviet invasion of Israel occurred, the 1980s passed without the events Lindsey suggested, and the Soviet Union itself dissolved in 1991. The historian Paul Boyer, in When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Harvard University Press, 1992), placed Lindsey alongside other prophecy popularizers as distinct from biblical scholars proper, arguing that reading each new headline, a war, an alliance, a technology, as a fresh fulfillment of ancient prophecy had produced a long history of confident, specific predictions that failed on their own terms without discrediting the broader belief that produced them. Lindsey continued writing and revising his prophetic timetable in later books for decades afterward.