When a film as widely promoted and loved as Universal’s She says is slammed at the box office, it’s wise to be careful.
This weekend, journalism’s procedural drama, about the pursuit of sexual predator Harvey Weinstein by two reporters from The New York Times, will possibly gross $2.27 million from 2,022 theaters. That’s less than half of the already paltry $5-6 million predicted a few days ago – a brutal beating for a film that had generally good reviews and was tagged on Saturday by eight of 22 “pundits.” from sister site Gold Derby as one of the top ten contenders for Best Picture.
The opening is a flop, and not one that can be undone by technical failures – bad theaters, bad release date, bad marketing or whatever.
On the contrary, the public simply turned away. It didn’t even seem, not to mention the presumed benefits of a high-profile story, a major New York Film Festival debut, and a talented cast, featuring Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan, and Patricia Clarkson. .
So someone sends a message, and it’s up to an increasingly shaky film company to figure out exactly what it is.
By Monday there will be a lot of opinions, I’m sure. And with the weekend still underway, it’s impossible to offer more than educated guesses. But, for what it’s worth, here are my best guesses so far:
Viewers are emotionally drained. They poured their entire reservoir of outrage and resentment into a midterm election that left political and cultural tensions essentially unchanged. There’s simply nothing left to spend on an actual prosecutor’s image, not even one that, as critic Alexis Soloski wrote in The temperature, wishes to avoid overheated polemics. (“Instead of incendiary feminism, the film emphasizes decency, insight and rigor,” she insisted.) The emergence of Angel Studios is particularly fascinating. The Chosen: Season 3 – a faith-based story about Jesus Christ and his disciples – as the third theatrical event of the weekend, just behind the week Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and The menu, with over $8 million in box office sales. The conflict ripped from the headlines is in eclipse; faith and fantasy rise.
People are done with Harvey Weinstein. Yeah, he’s still on trial for sex crimes in Los Angeles. But the ongoing lawsuits are disappointing. No matter what the jury decides, he has already been convicted of rape in New York, is behind bars and will remain so, barring a Cosby-style victory on appeal. Meanwhile, media consumers in the early moviegoer demographic, young adults, have shifted to more contemporary villains. The current frontrunner, eclipsing even progressive nemesis Elon Musk, is 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto king. With last week’s auction on a book by Michael Lewis about the Bankman-Fried FTX scandal, a screen race, big or small, has begun. By the time it ends, alas, his story may be as twisted as Weinstein’s. But that’s the nature of the media beast.
Journalists aren’t as interesting as they think. Including those of The New York Times, and I say this having been one. In movies, reporters and editors perform best when deeply flawed, like the cynical schemer portrayed by Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the holeor the many iterations of semi-corrupt Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns, or those flawed boomer heroes Woodward and Bernstein, whose All the President’s Men tactics that we continue to debate. Same Projector, winner of Best Picture and the most well-known journalistic drama of recent years, discussed some goofy character portrayals – in particular Liev Schreiber’s deadpan and deadpan performance as Boston Globe editor Marty Baron – and a ironically enjoyed playing as a period piece. Released in 2015, at the time of the reckless internet, the shot made fun of the old-fashioned setbacks of journalists who, working only 12 or 13 years earlier, already looked like dinosaurs. She says, on the other hand, is quite pious. As the Time the critic Soloski reminds us, these journalists do things correctly. And when they knock on your door, your first instinct is, well, to run the other way.
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