5 Reasons Why Mickey 17 Flopped At The Box Office - SlashFilm
Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 disappointed at the box office during its opening weekend. Here are five reasons the sci-fi satire flopped.
I wasn’t aware that it flopped, though this seems to have been the press narrative for many outlets from its release.
$53 million global opening weekend sounds like pretty good business to me.
https://deadline.com/2025/03/mickey-17-ne-zha-2-china-global-international-box-office-1236320079/
$53 million global opening weekend sounds like pretty good business to me.
Unfortunately, the movie's budget is $118 million, not including the $80 million Warner Bros. spent to market the movie. And they have to split the revenue 50-50 with the theaters.
Factoring all of those, Mickey 17 would need to make at least $300 million just to break even.
Especially since outside of all the "it bombed articles" there was practically fuck all advertising it
Yeah, I agree - seems a pretty reasonable take for a movie released this time of year. I can't help but wonder if the press covering Hollywood just wants it to fail because of WB's current leadership's unpopularity. I'm no fan either, but something just smells fishy here...
As a sci-fi nerd, film buff and leftist, this movie was pretty much made for me, but I only found out about it about 2 days before it was released. Seems to me that they didn't push it at all. I only saw it because a friend of mine had a spare ticket.
Unfortunately, we found the movie boring, incoherent and, for the most part, unfunny. I really loved parasite so was very disappointed that this missed the mark so badly.
Sucks that the author of the article’s takeaway is basically “don’t do original non-franchise films.” I thought
Also was annoyed with Pattinson’s voice.
I have the complete opposite take, I thought the voice he created for the character was great. ::: spoiler spoiler The narration was hilarious, he sounded so stupid and resigned to his tragic comedy of a life and the way they paired that with a lot of visual gags made the first two thirds of the film so enjoyable for me. To me, where it really fell off was the final third which became a very slow, linear trudge towards a very predictable Hollywood happy ending. Every scene from the post-attempted assassination arrests onward dragged so badly. :::
Mickey wasn't a idiot though. Ironically it just became a typical Hollywood attack on the working man rather than depicting a lower class character that likes to read about history but doesn't have skills his society demands he have in order to respect his personhood.
Especially since it's not original, but adapted from a book.
Making a overtly political film so on the nose that it will alienate 50% of your possible audience.... Then getting shocked when the film under performs.
This scifi film isn't scifi, it's a extended SNL skit with scifi window dressing. So you lost your scifi audience here
The humor in the film is cringe humor, that doesn't appeal to all humor demographics.
So the audience is people who hate trump but don't mind thinking about trump, people who don't dislike scifi trappings but also don't really like scifi themes/ideas, and people who want to watch a full hour of political cringe humor. That is a small audience.
I agree with you on the first part. It was just not that interesting, especially given that the concept of cloning seems really cool. But I feel like they did not discover enough in this regard but decided to make some political comments.
So the audience is people who hate trump but don’t mind thinking about trump
where did you derive that from? just curious, I've only seen one trailer, thanks
I explain it better over here https://hackertalks.com/post/7479031
The people who are going to watch it are people who don't like trump, but want to see trump being made fun of for a entire movie. That demographic exists, and they will really like it. But in the context of a box office flop, it does explain things.
Making super topical political satire narrows the audience and dates the production.