 The story focuses on Robert Kearns (played by Greg Kinnear) and his legal battle against the Ford Motor Company after they developed an intermittent windshield wiper based on ideas the inventor had patented.The film's title comes from the phrase "flash of genius" (like "stroke of genius"), which is patent law terminology that was in effect from 1941 to 1952, although Kearns's patent was filed in 1964; it held that the "inventive act" must come into the mind of an inventor as a kind of epiphany, and not as the result of tinkering.The film opened on 1,098 screens in the United States on October 3, 2008, and earned $2.2 million on its opening weekend.