So, Ridley Scott’s film “The Last Duel” opened in late October. So far it has raked in nearly $29 million ($11M domestic, $18M foreign)… on a budget of about $100 million. This is by any metric a disaster. It’s odd: both critics and audiences seem to like it according to Rotten Tomatoes. So why did it fail? I dunno. I haven’t seen it; I saw the trailers and they’re… ok, I guess. Didn’t really inspire me to get off my keister and into a pandemic infested theater where five cents of sugar water costs six bucks and a handful of kerploded corn is another seven.
But Ridley Scott know exactly why it failed. Those darned kids!
“I think what it boils down to — what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these ᚠᚢᛍᚴᛁᚿᚵ cellphones. The millennian [sic] do not ever want to be taught anything unless you’re told it on a cellphone,” Scott said.
Yeah, uh-huh.
Personally, while I don’t *know* why it failed, I would *guess* that after a year of lockdowns and panic mongering, people have kinda lost the thrill of the moviegoing experience. Yes, “No Time To Die” apparently made bank, but Ghostbusters has so far only made $118 million worldwide… another disaster, though obviously not as bad of one. Going to the movies is more of a hassle than it once was (fewer theaters, for a start) while being more expensive; if you’re going as a family or a group of friends, you could *easily* spend more for a couple hours than for a whole month of some streaming service. TV’s these days are *huge* and the resolution is greater than the human eyeball can take in; easy to have quite a number of people over to watch some movie or show, all with cheap snacks and no mask mandates or shrieking Karens. Going to the theater was probably always going to go into decline thanks to streaming and 4k wall-sized TVs, but the Commie Cough only sped that along.
Looking at the top worldwide movies of 2021 on box Office Mojo, it looks like if Ridley Scott wants to make the big money he needs to go straight to the Chinese market. Top two grossing movies of the year were Chinese flicks, with the highest grossing being a movie about the Chinese military “volunteers” sent to fight at Chosin reservoir during the Korean War.
