Timing is everything in virtually all aspects of life, and in the case of Roland Emmerich’s White House Down, the worst thing that could have happened to the blockbuster action extravaganza was the fact it released three months after Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen.
You wait all your life for a thinly-veiled Die Hard imitation set in the presidential abode to come along, only to get two in quick succession. As tends to be the case with any case of twin films, though, there could only be one winner; and it was Gerard Butler who emerged victorious over Channing Tatum in the action hero stakes.
In defense of White House Down, it did earn more money at the box office than Olympus Has Fallen and scored better reviews from critics, but it also only managed to outstrip its spiritual predecessor by a mere $35 million while costing $80 million more to make, which in turn saw Sony take an estimated write-down of $100 million on the failed potential franchise-starter.
Jamie Foxx’s commander-in-chief getting caught up in a hostile takeover of his own residence does offer plenty of the loud, dumb, fun we’ve been conditioned to expect from Emmerich over the years, and the debate still rages as to whether or not Olympus Has Fallen truly deserved to be the one to launch a multi-film series.
At the end of the day, money always talks loudest, but at least White House Down has been proving its worth on streaming. Per FlixPatrol, the catastrophic commercial disaster has become one of the top-viewed titles on Starz, almost a decade after squandering a perfectly good premise on an underwhelming shoot ’em up.
