It’s “‘billy” bonanza.
In the 24 hours since former President Donald Trump named Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, 39, as his running mate on the Republican ticket for the 2024 presidential election, views of the Netflix movie based on Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” have shot up 1,179%.
Citing data from Luminate, Variety reported that the 2020 film, directed by Ron Howard and starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams, was viewed 19.2 million minutes on Monday — up from 1.5 million the day before.
That equates to 163,836 individual plays of the movie Monday.
Close received her eighth Academy Award nomination for playing Mamaw, Vance’s grandmother.
Adams took on the role of his mother, Bev.
Sales of Vance’s 2016 popular book about his life growing up in a working class Appalachian family have fared well in the wake of the announcement, also.
On Tuesday, the paperback and hardcover editions of “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” respectively held the No. 1 and No. 2 bestseller slots on Amazon’s books list.
The memoir, published in June 2016, exploded as Donald Trump became the Republican presidential candidate that year, because, in a deeply personal way, explained the struggles of rural Americans.
“It is an eye-opening field guide to an unruly and hard-to-understand group, many of them born and bred Democrats,” The Post’s Kyle Smith wrote.
“It’s a superb book given an extra layer of importance by its political reverberations.”
Trump announced Vance as his VP pick on the social media platform Truth Social Monday as the Republican National Convention was kicking off in Milwaukee, Wis.
“After lengthy deliberation and thought, and considering the tremendous talents of many others, I have decided that the person best suited to assume the position of Vice President of the United States is Senator J.D. Vance of the Great State of Ohio,” Trump wrote.
“J.D. honorably served our Country in the Marine Corps, graduated from Ohio State University in two years, Summa Cum Laude, and is a Yale Law School Graduate, where he was Editor of The Yale Law Journal, and President of the Yale Law Veterans Association.”
