Or could it be that it was a lousy movie?

I haven't seen it, but reviews from even those papers sympathetic to Oliver Stone's worldview have, at best, praised his movie "Alexander" with faint damns. Nevertheless, here is Stone opining about the real conspiracy behind his movie's box office failure: "Oscar-winning writer-director Oliver Stone blamed 'raging fundamentalism in morality' for the frosty reception that his new film 'Alexander' is getting in his native United States."