Small score for Dwayne Johnson and Red One at the US box office

Amazon's action comedy cost $250 million. It will not break even in theaters and will soon be released for streaming on Prime Video.

It's a textbook case that's livening up American cinemas this weekend. Amazon and the MGM studio (which it recently acquired) have produced a very big Christmas action comedy, led by two Hollywood superstars: Dwayne Johnson And Chris Rock. Red One therefore avoided the direct streaming release – via Prime Video – to go first through cinemas. And the results are not very conclusive: Red One grossed $34 million in 4,032 theaters across the Atlantic over the past three days (and just over 60 million worldwide).

Certainly, the blockbuster of Jake Kasdan took the lead in the ranking and dethroned Venom 3. But the enormous action fantasy cost $250 million in production alone, to which must be added $100 million in promotion. Suffice to say that the film will have to take full advantage of the end-of-year holidays to be profitable in theaters. This obviously won't happen (Gladiator 2, Moana 2 arrive) especially since the critics did not like this story of the kidnapping of Santa Claus (JK Simmons), whose hostage situation triggers a rescue mission by his North Pole bodyguard (Johnson) and a bounty hunter (Evans).

For any studio, this opening weekend would therefore have had the air of an industrial disaster. Yes, but here it is, Amazon MGM does not really need to ensure a hit on the big screen to justify the film. Box office revenue is only part of the equation and the studio mainly sees the cinema release as a way to generate buzz that will benefit its Prime Video platform. Given the difficulty of knowing the real audiences for streaming films, it is very difficult to know if this kind of 250 million bet really pays off (if Amazon orders Red One 2then we will have a clue to the answer…).

What we do know, however, is that the headache is enormous for French broadcasting. Because the media chronology prevents a cinema release before a streaming broadcast. So that Red One will not be released in theaters in France and will wait to be directly programmed on Prime Video France to reach us. No date yet for the streaming release, neither here nor in the USA.

In the rest of the US box office, we can point out that Venom 3 slowdown for its fourth weekend in cinemas. The final part of the symbiote saga led by Tom Hardy accumulates $127.6 million at the US box office and $436.1 million worldwide and will end up in the waters of Let There Be Carnage ($506 million worldwide in 2021).

Note that Hugh Grant and its creepy Heretic (which will be released on November 27 in France) is approaching $21 million in worldwide revenue. A decent score for this low-budget horror film (less than 10 million).