4 days ago
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Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans and Lucy Liu have been hustling their film Red One in recent weeks. Given the cast, I thought this was some kind of standard espionage/action film, but no – it’s a Christmas movie. The Rock, who produced the film, plays “the North Pole’s Head of Security” and he teams up with a bounty hunter, played by Chris Evans, and they have to save Christmas after Santa is kidnapped. Sounds terrifically stupid, right? What’s hilarious is that Johnson has been giving some very out-of-touch interviews about the film, like when he claimed that watching Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on IMAX convinced him that Red One should also be an IMAX film: “I watch ‘Oppenheimer.’ It was amazing, but I was thinking: ‘Holy sh-t. “Red One” on this screen and with this technology could be game over.’ I remember texting [director Jake Kasdan] a picture of my bare chest and a picture of the screen and we realized how cool [Imax] would be.” Which explains how Red One’s production budget bloated to $250 million, I guess. Well, funny story. Red One might be one of the biggest bombs of the year?
“Treat them the same way you treat us! How dare you?!” are some of the screams I’ve been getting from traditional major studios when it comes to the chilly box office performance of the Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans $200M Christmas action movie Red One. (“No! It’s $250M!” exclaims one ex-Amazon-er with knowledge). And at an opening of $30M, after a $10.9M Friday, we can’t ignore the fact that we’ve seen better from The Rock, as far as his solo non-Fast & Furious projects go.
And, damn, if this isn’t a high budget. That’s the biggest problem here with Red One overall. However, that’s what you get when you do business with the industrial complex that is the Rock. The gossip can cry tardiness, entourages, water bottles, schedules, studio execs asleep at the wheel and an exorbitant amount of jelly beans in Rock’s trailer — it doesn’t matter. Capisce? This is what it costs to get into business with Johnson, and the only ones who are bold enough to invest in this endeavor are streamers like Netflix with Red Notice and Amazon MGM Studios here with Red One. The Rock has yet to scale down the budget of one of his tentpoles.
First, to placate the irate, traditional model studio brass who want to put Red One side-by-side with the performance of Joker: Folie a Deux, let’s recognize the fact here that this opening for Red One is on par with the lower end of Johnson’s original IP, one of those examples being Skyscraper ($130M production cost yielding $24.9M domestic opening, $68.4M domestic final, worldwide was $304.8M booted by $98M+ from China). There’s an argument to be made that the movie in its execution is more like a lightweight Lethal Weapon for audiences than a family film, which is why we’re not seeing a rush from the latter audience.
In the same breath, Red One is arguably the best opening for a movie hatched by a streamer, besting Apple’s Killers of the Flower Moon ($23.2M) and it’s in the vicinity of where Christmas live-action movies open. Don’t knock the Rock’s star power: He’s arguably the first Hollywood star to have two No. 1 openings in a given month from two different films; the expectation is that Disney’s Moana 2 will soar to a $135M 5-day over Thanksgiving.
Deadline’s argument seems to be that The Rock’s dumbest and worst movies usually break even at the end of the day, or maybe even make the studio a little money. But it looks like Red One won’t even be able to limp along until it breaks even. While MGM-Amazon wants to keep Red One in theaters throughout the Christmas season, I doubt they’ll be able to? Not with Gladiator II and Wicked taking up so much space in the coming weeks/months, not to mention all of the awards-bait movies which will start to get wide or limited releases. All in all, it looks like Red One is going to lose a lot of money. Not as much as Joker 2 (lmao) but a lot of money.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
