Looking for lessons on the “She Said” box office discount

When a film is as heavily promoted and highly rated as Universal’s she said being beaten at the box office, it is advisable to pay attention.

This weekend, the journalistic procedural drama surrounding the prosecution of sex offender Harvey Weinstein is played out by two reporters The New York Times, earning $2.27 million in 2,022 theaters. That’s less than half the $5-6 million minimum predicted a few days ago — a brutal blow for a film that had generally good reviews and was picked up by eight of the 22 “experts” on Saturday the sister site Gold Derby is tagged. as one of the top ten contenders for Best Picture.

The opening is a flop, and not the kind that can be chalked up to technical glitches – the wrong theaters, a bad release date, bad marketing or whatever.

On the contrary, the audience simply turned away. It didn’t even seem like it, let alone the perceived advantages of a high-profile story, a prominent New York Film Festival debut and a talented cast with Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan and Patricia Clarkson.

Someone like that is sending a message, and it’s up to an increasingly shaky film company to figure out exactly what it is.

There will be many opinions by Monday, I’m sure. And with the weekend still underway, it’s impossible to offer anything 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 midterm elections that left political and cultural tensions essentially unchanged. There’s just nothing more worth spending on a lifelike photo of the prosecution, not even one, as reviewer Alexis Soloski wrote The times, makes a point of avoiding overheated polemics. (“Instead of pompous feminism, the film emphasizes decency, wisdom and ruthlessness,” she pointed out.) The rise of Angel Studios is particularly intriguing. The Chosen: Season 3 — a faith-based story about Jesus Christ and his followers — as the third-ranked theatrical event of the weekend, just behind the week-long Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and The menu, with box office sales of over $8 million. Conflict ‘taken from the headlines’ is in obscurity; Faith and imagination increase.

People are done with Harvey Weinstein. Yes, he is still on trial for sex crimes in Los Angeles. But the current effort is disappointing. Whatever the jury decides, he has already been convicted of rape in New York, is behind bars, and will remain so unless he wins the appeal like Cosby did. Meanwhile, media consumers in the main group of moviegoers, the young adults, have shifted to more contemporary villains. The current favorite, eclipsing even progressive nemesis Elon Musk, is 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced crypto king. With last week’s bid for a book by Michael Lewis about the Bankman Fried FTX scandal, a race for the silver screen, big and small, began. In the end, his story could be just as messed up as Weinstein’s. But that’s the nature of the media beast.

Journalists are not as interesting as they think they are. Including that of The New York Times, and I say it was one. In movies, reporters and editors are at their best when they are deeply flawed, like the cynical scoundrel played by Kirk Douglas in Billy Wilder. bait in the holeor the many iterations of the semi-corrupt Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns, or the imperfect Boomer heroes Woodward and Bernstein, whose All the president’s men Tactics we continue to discuss. Even headlight, a Best Picture winner and best-remembered journalistic drama of the past few years, starred in some funny character portrayals — notably Liev Schreiber’s deadpan, deadpan portrayal as Boston Globe editor Marty Baron — and ironically using the game like a historical play. Released in 2015 when the ruthless internet reigned supreme, the photo reveled in the old-fashioned bubble gum shuffling of journalists who already looked like dinosaurs when they were working just 12 or 13 years earlier. she said, on the other hand is quite pious. Like the time Reviewer Soloski reminds us that these reporters are doing things right. And when they knock on your door, your first instinct is to run the other way.