Glamorous super spies know plenty about weapons: guns, knives, high explosives.
So perhaps it’s only fitting that Argylle—a film predicated on a glamorous super spy—bombed.
Oh, sure. Look at the top of the box office, and you’ll see Argylle perched atop it, waving around the estimated $18 million it earned in North America like a victory flag. But on closer examination, that $18 million might look like a flag of surrender: Universal Pictures reportedly spent $200 million to make Argylle—and that’s before marketing costs. The $18 million it made domestically (and the $17.3 million it collected overseas) is barely enough to pay the production’s cell phone bill.
Maybe Argylle’s makers should’ve dumped the espionage plot and instead told a nifty Bible story.
That strategy seems to be working for the folks at Angel Studios. The Chosen—not a movie, but the first three episodes of the show’s fourth season—finished second with $6 million, according to Box Office Mojo. That total doesn’t even include the $1.4 million that The Chosen banked during its Thursday preview screenings.
The Chosen’s performance surprised plenty of box-office prognosticators. And some wag their fingers of blame at an industry-wide cinematic slump rather than give props to The Chosen. “In effect, Mean Girls, The Beekeeper, Wonka, and Migrationhave all failed the test against a relatively low-budget TV show,” wrote Lukas Shayo for Screenrant.
No matter: With this three-episode installment of The Chosen scheduled to play in theaters through Feb. 14, followed by theatrical releases of rest of the season (episodes 4-6 will be released Feb. 15, and episodes 7-8 will be out Feb. 29), February just might turn out to be The Chosen month.
The Beekeeper indeed did lose to a TV show. Jason Statham’s latest actioner slipped to third with an estimated $5.3 million. It has now collected $49.4 million, but The Beekeeper’s buzz is clearly fading.
Meanwhile, Wonka continues to manufacture its own sweet returns. Despite being on the box-office shelves for two solid months now, this family friendly cinematic confection earned another $4.8 million in North America, pushing its total domestic tally to $201.1 million. And if we account for the $370.6 million it has earned overseas, Wonka has banked a nigh-staggering $571.7 million.
Migration, another long-in-the-tooth family film, closed out the top five with $4.8 million. The animated lark has feathered its domestic nest with a total of 106.2 million dollar … bills.
Get it? Bills? It’s a movie about ducks? It’s—never mind.
2 Responses
The teaser for “Argylle” was utterly indecipherable, and it’s clocking in at only 34% at Rotten Tomatoes. That’s as much as I need to know. But as we get closer to Oscar Night, I’ve been trying to see as many of the movies nominated for Best Picture as possible. Last week I saw “American Fiction” and “The Holdovers.” Both excellent.
The writing was on the wall for Argylle. Overblown budget. Grating marketing campaign that became a viral joke in all the wrong ways (see Snakes on a Plane). Released in January when half the country was snowed in, and which is usually a bummer month for movies anyway. An ostensibly original movie we’ve actually seen about 11,000 times, but without the built-in appeal of a Bond film. Diminishing returns for a director who keeps falling back on the same smirking tone. A PG-13 rating that turned off the teens who enjoyed the cheeky ultraviolence of the Kingsman movies. And I haven’t seen it, but apparently the screenplay is witless and derivative, substituting twists for fresh ideas.