“Blade Runner 2049” may have topped the box office this weekend, but the numbers weren’t convincing. Despite playing on over 4000 screens in North America, the film could only manage $31 million in ticket sales, a rather disappointing return for a movie that cost $150 million. The returns are even harder to accept given the nearly unanimous praise for Denis Villeneuve‘s bold and unique sci-fi film, and the studio admits they were slightly surprised by how things shook out.
Warner Bros. domestic distribution president Jeff Goldstein told Reuters that “Blade Runner 2049” in particular underperformed in mid-sized and smaller markets, blaming the films near three-hour running time and competition from the baseball playoffs for keeping people away.
“We did well in the major and high-profile markets,” he also shared. “Alcon [Entertainment] and Denis made an amazing movie. The audience for it was narrower than we anticipated.”
To go back to what I wrote yesterday, as revered as “Blade Runner” is, it was never on the level of “Star Wars” in terms of pop culture currency, so it shouldn’t be all that surprising that the fanbase for ‘2049’ was limited. Again, kudos to Warner Bros., Alcon, and Sony for making the movie but this was never meant to be a four-quadrant hit. From a business perspective, one wonders if the decision to try and make a blockbuster out of a property that was never more than a cult favorite was a bit misguided.
One could argue that the marketing also didn’t help the film, with Warner Bros. leaning on keeping things enigmatic, possibly to the point of undermining actual interest in the movie. At least, that’s what Max Landis thinks.
https://twitter.com/Uptomyknees/status/917446628386078720
The irony here is that Ridley Scott‘s original also didn’t do so well when it opened – only after time passed did the picture truly get recognized as a classic of the genre. Something tells me that the same will happen with “Blade Runner 2049.”
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Damn, he literally tweeted these less than 10 minutes ago. Y’all work fast, I guess.
People keep blaming the runtime, the trailers, the murky plotline … it’s the movie’s complete lack of female appeal that caused its audience to narrow. The movie’s female characters largely exist to be brutalized or sexualized, hence why very few women showed up to watch. This is not rocket science.
I agree with you on how the film portrays females, but I don’t see how people would know that going in. This article is about first weekend box office sales, so the people who went/did not go would largely be affected by previous experience with the IP, or the trailers/marketing.
The trailers didn’t reflect anything that would ultimately hook in general female audiences. Sci-Fi genre generally skews male, and there’s nothing wrong with having two male leads in your film, but this movie’s ultimate view/depiction of women is pretty effing gross. WOM travels fast
So can i ask you, if the same depiction of men happens, do you have similar problem with that?
What do you mean ‘same depiction’? Like, if most of the men in the film were stripped naked to be stared down by the female characters? It’d be equally gross.
Hey guess what! Its a….. DYSTOPIA. Not trying to portray where we want to be but where we are going, at least in parts. Not all art is going to show a utopian view of gender equality. This view point doesn’t work for art unless it is idealizing the mistreatment of women when this film is so clearly the antithesis of that.
If there was a misogynistic commentary in this film, like say, SOCIAL NETWORK, I could see where you’re coming from. Any defense that says there’s an anti-misogynistic commentary just bc it’s a dystopia, I think is being projected onto the film because it doesn’t exist in the text. This is a movie about dudes and their desires, told from an exclusively male point of view. There’s nothing that counter-balances the way women are depicted on-screen.
SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!
I do not want to spoil this movie for anyone b/c I loved it but I can’t agree with your view on how women arrested in the film. Everyone is brutalized in the movie. The male protagonist is brutalized more often and severely than any character. Almost all the main female characters were in positions of power. K served under a woman. She protect him at the risk of her own. LUV was a fully capable female. Sure, she was sadistic but effective. The savior child for the Replicants was a woman!! The leader of the Replicant resistance was a woman.
The only female character sexualized was JOI. But K didnt treat her that way. The billboard was so explicit b/c it drove home the idea how someone could get caught into a shallow illusion. But it also create the idea the K treated with so much care, respect, and purpose that she was capable of being more than what she was created, just like Replicant. Or, maybe she was infiltrated by the Resistance to manipulate K. Who knows? But that’s the beauty of the movie.
Nope
I really wanted to like the movie too man but sometimes reality doesn’t line up with our hopes and dreams ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I think all of us see movies differently. Personally, I was delighted and was left speechless with Blade Runner 2049. This film was a masterpiece in every way…I loved it.
My opinion is also from the female audience.
I believe the point of the film is to subvert exactly what you are pointing out. These tropes are core to detective fiction, but, as with this director’s other films, he’s interested in how people prefer to see each other as projections of their own needs and problems, rather than as people (the film Enemy is particularly critical of men ion this point) so it would be surprising if he simply threw his philosophy out the window when making this film. Two of the women in the film are created by a man, and one of them is literally a fantasy projection serving food in a 50s outfit. It is a world that has destroyed itself with consumerized objectification, to the point where the consumers are product themselves, like K. It imperfectly describes the trap of sexist, modern consumerism: K is designed/ raised to have these lonely, hyper-caricaturized needs, and Joi is designed to fulfill those needs, and sold to K as a product. Just like men today. The final joke on him us that he’s not even important at all; all his relationships are simply a fantasy. The film is a tragedy about the Holmes and lack of talk connecting that we all suffer from due to these narcissistic, largely masculine flaws.
I still don’t understand why we are speaking about the film as a failure already because it hasn’t had the giant opening weekend which was expected. There is still a lot of time left for it to pull a decent amount from theaters and the older skewing audiences which it is drawing watch movies on their own time instead of running out the first week. By framing the conversation so quickly of it being perceived to be a “box office failure” with so many postmortem think pieces written up already about the reason why it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy since it creates bad buzz which keeps people away that are on the fence.
People should be focused about the quality of the film and trying to encourage them to go see it. If nothing else the ultimate fate of the film will be spoken in the quality of the film. And right now that is what should be the real story, how Denis Villeneuve made a great film. No one will care how much it did or didn’t make in the theaters 10 years from now other than the film executives.
“No one will care how much it did “, oh, I think the producers will care. They already care.
This might spell the end for Alcon, unfortunately.
You have a point there, i think we should all think how great the movie is and not about money
Except that movies that underperform are now yanked immediately from theatres and no one has a chance to see them anymore. I have missed half of the movies I have wanted to see this year because I didn’t see them in their first week, which was also their last.