Brad Pitt Margot Robbie Movie Won’t Breakeven – Deadline

Damien Chazelle’s $80M 1920s-set Hollywood epic Babylon went up in a blaze of fire at the domestic box office this past weekend with an awful $5.3M four-day start.

Say what you will about harsh winter conditions impacting moviegoing across the country, however, this movie, which was greenlit by a previous Paramount regime and greatly supported by the new Brian Robbins administration, was against the odds as soon as it previewed to a cynical press more than a month ago at the Academy theater to lackluster reviews at 56% Rotten Tomatoes. Further burying the pic’s fate were audience exits including an awful C+ CinemaScore and PostTrak of 74% and 47% definite recommend, not to mention its 3-hour and 8-minute running time. Babylon is the lowest wide release stateside opening for star Margot Robbie at $3.6M, beating Amsterdam‘s $6.4M, as well as Brad Pitt as a leading man, lower than the $4M start of 1993’s True Romance.

With results like these, no one is making Babylon a choice to see over the holidays even though there’s a lack of adult competition. According to finance sources, it’s too soon to determine how much bleeding will go on here because the Robbie-Pitt movie doesn’t start its overseas rollout until mid-January. That said, this movie’s profit point lives around $250M WW, and that’s with a global marketing spend of around $80M, the same as its production cost. Paramount, like any studio, will scale back their marketing costs on the movie in the wake of its stateside flopping, I’m told. The pic has already notched five Golden Globe nominations including Best Picture Musical or Comedy.

Important to note that in the new Covid era, whatever a movie grosses at the box office hasn’t shown to impair its Oscar chances. And there are several examples to prove that, a chief case being Searchlight’s 2021 Best Picture Winner Nomadland which did single-digit grosses and on which the Disney arthouse label never reported the pic’s official ticket sales.

Domestic for Babylon is lucky to hit $20M which puts an immense amount of pressure on overseas to deliver, meaning another $230M which is mission impossible. That said, Paramount believes the pic’s running time, which is more appetizing to an overseas crowd, plus UK and French reviews will give Babylon some sort of pulse abroad. “They like these types of movies,” says one insider. Chazelle’s First Man made 57% of its $105M WW total overseas. Japan, South Korea, UK and France were key territories for that movie, as well as for Chazelle’s multi-Oscar winner La La Land. Last year, Guillermo del Toro’s $60M period piece Nightmare Alley made $11.3M domestic and $39.6M WW.

Before anyone writes an obituary on original movies at the box office off on Babylon‘s results, it’s important to distinguish the movie from all others. The pic with its inside-Hollywood period tale was already a gamble, not to mention its hard ‘R’ story which in the first 30 minutes before the title credit includes an elephant pooping on a human and a Fatty Arbuckle-type getting defecated on by a hooker. Robbie’s Clara Bow-like character vomits at a stuffy Hollywood soiree much later in the film. Who was the audience for this aside from critics and awards voters? Movies about the inner workings of Hollywood were always low-grossers historically. Not to mention, the price point on this period piece, just like WWI-era set Amsterdam, made the project an impossible task to achieve profitability for rival studios. So, they passed.

Examples of Hollywood insider movies that didn’t translate to mass audiences: The 3x Oscar-nominated Chaplin starring Robert Downey Jr. back in 1992 which only did $9.5M stateside (although it did make Hollywood take the SNL alum seriously as an actor) and the 2x Cannes winning title The Player only grossed $21.7M that year as well.

Paramount thought they had Wolf of Wall Street and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in Babylon. They did not: Both of those movies starred Leonardo DiCaprio. Wolf of Wall Street worked ($406.8M WW) in its appeal of its thrilling subject matter to upscale audiences about the rise and fall of stockbroker Jordan Belfort, while Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ($377.6M WW) had the electric storytelling of Quentin Tarantino. Babylon, which follows the mayhem that ensued in Hollywood during the transition from silent films to…