'American Sniper' Box Office Sales News: Chris Kyle Movie Tops For Second Week Amid Controversy

The war drama film "American Sniper" dominated the box office for a second weekend amid controversy that it allegedly spurs anti-Muslim sentiments.

The film directed by Clint Eastwood added $64.6 million to last weekend's $107 million after expanding to more theaters, Bloomberg reported.

Nominated for six Oscars, including one for Best Picture, "American Sniper" was reported to be backed with a Warner Bros. marketing plan to make it attractive to all Americans of various political leanings.

The movie depicts the story of Chris Kyle, the U.S. Navy Seal who set a record for scoring the highest known single kill count in U.S. military history while serving in Iraq following Desert Storm in the early 1990s.

"American Sniper has spurred on quite a conversation and audiences want to see what everyone is talking about," said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Rentrak Corp. "For a serious R-rated drama usually reserved for summer, it's highly unusual."

Last week, an Arab-American civil rights group reportedly urged Eastwood and the movie's lead actor Bradley Cooper (who plays Kyle) to condemn the hateful language directed at U.S. Arabs and Muslims following the movie's release.

In a letter to the two dated Jan. 21, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee said its members have become targets of "violent threats" since early last week, even before the film's general release.

The Washington-based panel asked Eastwood and Cooper to spread their message of tolerance. "It is our opinion that you could play a significant role in assisting us in alleviating the danger we are facing," said the letter.

The committee said a "majority of the violent threats we have seen over the past few days are results of how Arab and Muslims are depicted in American Sniper."

It said its members are already working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the police to evaluate the threats.

Nevertheless, the group's president, Samer Khalaf, said they will not call for a boycott of the film, given its box office success. "If we boycott it, it will only cause people to want to see it more," he explained.

The group asked Arabs and Muslims to send them copies of threatening messages they received. Over 100 have been gathered, all from social media.

"The threats advocate for the murder of Arabs, one going as far as to say, 'Great f**king movie and now I really want to kill some f**king ragheads.' In another threat a user wrote, 'American Sniper makes me wanna go shoot some f**king Arabs,'" the group told Eastwood in its letter.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros., which released the film, maintained that it "denounces any violent, anti-Muslim rhetoric, including that which has been attributed to viewers" of the film.

Eastwood and Cooper had not commented yet on the controversy.