Looking For Lessons In The ‘She Said’ Box-Office Beatdown
20.11.2022 - 19:53
/ deadline.com
When a film as heavily promoted and well-regarded as Universal’s She Said gets body-slammed at the box office, it’s wise to pay attention.
This weekend, the journalism procedural drama, about the pursuit of sexual predator Harvey Weinstein by two reporters from The New York Times, will take in perhaps $2.27 million in 2,022 theaters. That’s less than half of the already minimal $5-to-6 million predicted a few short days ago—a brutal drubbing for a film that had generally good reviews and as of Saturday was tagged by eight out of 22 “experts” at sister site Gold Derby as one of the ten top contenders for Best Picture.
The opening is a flop, and not the kind that can be written off to technical failures—the wrong theaters, a bad release date, poor marketing or whatever.
Rather, the audience simply turned away. It didn’t even look, never mind the presumed advantages of a high-profile story, a prominent New York Film Festival debut, and a talented cast, featuring Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan and Patricia Clarkson.
So somebody is sending a message, and it behooves an increasingly wobbly film business to figure out exactly what that is.
By Monday, there will be plenty of opinions, I’m sure. And with the weekend still underway, it’s impossible to offer more than educated guesswork. But, for what it’s worth, here are my best guesses so far:
Viewers are emotionally exhausted. They’ve poured their entire reservoir of indignation and resentment into a midterm election that left political and cultural tensions essentially unchanged. There’s simply nothing left to spend on a real-life, prosecutorial picture, not even one that, as reviewer Alexis Soloski wrote in The Times, makes a point of avoiding over-heated polemics. (“In place of