Is the end ding-dong-merrily-on-nigh for a once-important part of the movie calendar? There was a time when, each December, audiences flocked to cinemas to experience Christmas blockbusters: festive multiplex crowd-pleasers designed to make spirits bright (and major studios considerably richer). Last month, though, came a reminder of just how drastically things might have changed. Red One, an action comedy about a kidnapped Santa Claus, didn’t just endure brutal reviews, it also suffered the ignominy of the opening weekend equivalent of a stocking full of coal, making back a miserly $32.1m (£25m) against its $250m (£196m) budget. This, despite a cast led by two of mainstream cinema’s biggest names: Marvel’s Chris Evans and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
Theories about the Amazon-backed caper’s underperformance have varied. Some have suggested that audiences didn’t want “Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell, Jingle Bell Rock” – if you’ll excuse the pun – with Johnson’s star power appearing to be on the wane (just look at how his Black Adam franchise failed to launch in 2022). Others have blamed confusion over the film’s target audience; Red One occupies “an ill-considered audience no man’s land, too intense for little kids ... and too bland to attract teens and genre fans”, Wendy Ide wrote in The Observer. In Hollywood and internally at Amazon, though, many point to an assumption among consumers that the movie would be available to watch at home on Prime Video by Christmas, so what was the point in schlepping out to the cinema and paying for tickets? (And they were right: Red One arrived on Prime yesterday.)
