The pandemic has given every movie to hit theaters since March 2020 an excuse should it under-perform at the box office, but literary adaptation The Rhythm Section was released at the end of January, so it doesn’t have a cushion with which to explain its dismal performance.
It did set a record, to be fair, but not one that the creative team, producers, or studio would have been hoping for. Prior to its opening weekend, the action thriller was predicted to debut somewhere in the $9-12 million range, which was hardly great for a $50 million espionage story packed with big names that hailed from James Bond‘s Eon Productions.
By the time the dust had settled, anyone involved in The Rhythm Section would have bitten your hand off for those numbers, once the figures came in to reveal that a $2.8 million bow officially gave it the distinction of scoring the lowest-grossing first weekend for any title in history to play in over 3000 cinemas.
One positive is that Hugh Jackman’s Reminiscence has since managed to snatch the unwanted distinction away from The Rhythm Section, but the sci-fi mystery was an HBO Max hybrid that landed during the summer 2021 dead zone, so it’s not exactly a like-for-like comparison.
Blake Lively’s fiercely committed turn as a widow who recovers from a life of drug addiction and prostitution in order to become a deadly freelance assassin intent on solving the mystery of her family’s death has been finding a new lease of life on Netflix, though, with FlixPatrol revealing the critical and commercial dud has been rocketing up the Netflix most-watched list, which kind of makes sense when nobody was interested in paying to see it the first time around.
Published: Apr 2, 2022 02:43 am