In the latest big-name bomb to befall Hollywood in a rough few years for the silver screen, Tom Hanks’ “Here” opened at just under $5 million and looks set to lose big money for producer Miramax and distributor Sony.
Despite a wide opening (2,647 theaters) and big-name stars (Hanks and Robin Wright), “Here” only managed to open at No. 5 in its opening weekend, all behind films that had been in theaters for some time.
“Venom: The Last Dance” remained No. 1 with just over $25 million for the weekend, according to Box Office Mojo. “The Wild Robot,” “Smile 2,” and “Conclave” all finished ahead of “Here” despite having been in theaters for several weeks.
The film, which reunited Hanks with “Forrest Gump” and “Cast Away” director Robert Zemeckis — also responsible for “Back to the Future” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, among many other blockbusters — uses digital aging effects to allow “Hanks and Wright to portray teenagers and octogenarians across 105 minutes,” Variety reported.
The movie “follows the inhabitants of a single house over the course of 100 years,” Variety noted. Unfortunately, the vibe from critics seemed to indicate they felt like being trapped in that house for 100 years, too, which is why it earned a 36 percent rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
“You know those extended commercials that sometimes run around the holidays that offer up vague, sentimentalized bromides about love, family, and brotherhood that are brought to you by soulless corporations as part of their annual year-end ‘We’re good, right?’ campaigns?” wrote Peter Sobczynski in a one-star review for RogerEbert.com.
“Imagine one of those stretched out to 104 minutes, and you have Robert Zemeckis’ ‘Here,’ a hollow and vapid paean to the whole of the human experience that has all the depth and profundity of a generic greeting card. The result is a movie that isn’t just bad but baffling — one that traffics in practically every imaginable emotion without generating a genuine one of its own.”
Rex Reed in the Observer, meanwhile, noted it was trying to recapture the magic of “Forrest Gump” by reuniting the key principals — Hanks, Zemeckis, and Robin Wright, who played Jenny Curran, Forrest’s love interest, in that movie.
Instead, Reed wrote, it was “a lame attempt to make more money by capitalizing on a great film’s financial success using a revolutionary new technology that reduces overhead by eliminating the need to hire real actors.”
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“‘Here’ is a long and plotless mess about the passage of time in a single space defined through the years by imagery that begins with dinosaurs, progresses through cowboys and arrow-pointing Indians to the invention of the wheel, and ends up with traffic horns and supermarkets — all seen through the eyes of a single family,” he wrote, while noting that most of the movie takes place in a house.
“Along with avoiding the threat of a gargantuan budget, the movie saves a fortune on sets,” he said.
Well, that’s only half-true. While not hyper-expensive by the standards of modern Hollywood, “Here” wasn’t cheap, either. The stated budget for the film was $45 million; use the typical Hollywood math of doubling the budget to find the break-even point once promotion and distribution are factored in, and “Here” needs $90 million at the box office to turn a profit.
As of Saturday, according to Box Office Mojo, its worldwide gross stands at $11,375,818. Not only that, but its take fell by over 50 percent in its second weekend of release, meaning it’s probably not going to be a sleeper hit that sticks around theaters for a while.
The embarrassing first-weekend haul is less than 1 percent of Hanks’ highest-grossing film — “The Da Vinci Code,” at $758 million — or even the Hanks/Wright/Zemeckis “Forrest Gump,” which took home $677 million.
That being said, while “Here” is a rather impressive flop, it has company in the disappointment department.
As ScreenRant noted, after the modest comeback of 2023 — fueled by the “Barbenheimer” craze and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” — Hollywood is again facing a slump in 2024, with only two films topping the $1 billion box office mark worldwide: “Inside Out 2” with $1.697 billion and “Deadpool and Wolverine” with $1.337 billion.
Apparently, even the end of COVID hysteria wasn’t enough to save Hollywood from wokeness, streaming, recycling intellectual property or trite filmmaking. Who knew? Except moviegoers, of course.
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