The romantic fantasy film, which hit theaters on Friday, is led by Margot Robbie as Sarah and Colin Farrell as David, whose characters meet at a wedding and have both rented cars with a speaking GPS that guides them to locations where they open literal doors and are transported back in time to relive their most pivotal moments.
The movie’s story is also an original idea. As there have been many remakes, sequels and reboots, especially in the last couple of years, this year alone has seen new stories thrive on the big screen (Farrell mentions his favorites below) as well as last year’s Anora, which won the Academy Award for best picture.
“I feel like there’s a lot of original films at the moment, which makes me so happy,” Robbie told The Hollywood Reporter at the film’s New York City premiere. “Right now, in particular, is a really good time for film.”
Farrell echoed Robbie’s point and added that there’s a place for both to co-exist. “I know there’s a lot of sequels and there’s talk about a lot of sequels and IPs that have been used before and reimaginings and revisitings of worlds. This year I saw Bring Her Back, and then I saw obviously Sinners and the other day I saw Weapons,” he told THR. “I get really excited when I see original stuff, really, really excited. So there’s always going to be original stories and there’s always going to be rehashes and there’s room for both.”
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is inspired by screenwriter Seth Reiss‘ own personal experiences. “I was heartbroken. I had just been broken up with. I had rented a car and was driving to a wedding and I remember feeling at my lowest moment and then on the way back from the wedding, the GPS was like purge on to I-95 for 290 miles and then I thought, Well, what if it asked me, ‘Seth, do you want to go on a big, bold beautiful journey?’ And I was like, that might be a good idea for a movie,” Reiss said.
While the film explores the budding love between Sarah and David, which its director, Kogonada, told THR, Robbie and Farrell have a “unique spark together that was undeniable from the first day of rehearsal to the very end of the shoot,” it also examines the life regrets that can haunt you.
Specifically for Sarah, as she missed the chance to be with her mom when she died. One of the doors Sarah opens is her childhood home, where she then spends time with her mom and forgives herself for her own past mistakes. Robbie spoke about what it was like to shoot the emotional scenes with Lily Rabe, who plays Sarah’s mom.
“Doing those scenes in the movie were incredible because Lily and I we’re pretty much the same age, but the whole premise of the film is you walk through these doors and everyone sees you as younger self and so we’re doing these scenes where I felt like a little kid even though I’m acting against an actress who’s pretty much the same age as me and we had this mother-daughter dynamic nonetheless,” she said. “That’s really a credit to her and the kind of actor she is but it gives you an idea of the kind of movie it is, where there’s something surreal about it but it feels very grounded at the same time. It gets emotional, it’s funny, it’s romantic, you get a bit of everything.”
Reiss adds that he hopes the film will spark more new stories: “I think there’s nothing more fun than seeing something that we haven’t seen before, and it’s really exhilarating and it just reminds us of why we went to the movies.”
In Sony‘s quest to deliver original movies in an IP laden box office, their $50M+ negative global acquisition of the Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell fantasy romance drama, A Big Bold Beautiful Journeyfrom Korean filmmaker Kogonada, embarked on a road to nowhere at the box office with a $3.5M domestic and $8M global opening, this after critics sliced the pic’s tires with a 37% Rotten Tomatoes score.
CinemaScore was a B-, but the Screen Engine/Comscore PostTrak exits were worse at 2 1/2 stars, 64% positive and a low 44% definite recommend, overall a complete rejection by audiences.
Overall for the weekend, per PostTrak, women showed up at 59% giving A Big Bold Beautiful Journey a low 64% score. Those few who showed up had their boyfriends, partners or hubbies with them (close to 40% having a +1). Women under 25 (who showed up for Barbie at 39%) were only 14% in attendance with no patience for Robbie and Farrell’s romantic one hour-49 minutes chit-chat (and hardly any love scenes) with a 42% rating.
Anecdotally, yesterday I attended a 4:10 PM showtime at the Regal North Hollywood where I was one of ten people watching the movie. There were more people at the Saturday matinee I attended for Vertical Entertainment’s Ron Howard period thriller Eden at the AMC Universal Citywalk on that movie’s opening weekend (which bowed to $1M domestic).
Quite often studios will tell the media, if we keep writing negative things about original movies, then they’ll stop making them. Not true. When originality is great, and word of mouth is brilliant, and the marketing engines are in force, the creme rises to the top, again and again, even in a theatrical landscape that’s curbed by streaming.
For Robbie and Farrell, though A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, isn’t their lowest opening stateside, it’s certainly one of them. For the Barbie star, the movie is under the starts of such misfires Babylon ($3.6M) and Amsterdam ($6.4M) and for Farrell it’s under Seven Psychopaths ($4.2M opening) and above Voyagers ($1.4M). Some will argue that both actors are capped in their box office openings when it comes to original movies, but again, it goes back to reviews on A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. Non-starry vehicles like Weapons rallied to a $43.5M opening juiced by 94% certified fresh RT reviews (and, yes, that was horror).
Sony Pictures Releasing /Courtesy Everett Collection
Comparing A Big Bold Beautiful Journey to Sony/Wayfarer’s dark romance It Ends With Us is apples and oranges given that the latter is based on a popular Colleen Hoover penned source material, and the former a surrealist fantasy. It Ends With Us bucked its bad reviews at 54%, and overcame any box office handicaps in its stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, the movie providing box office stamina to both with a $50M U.S./Canada start.
If Sony anticipated great reviews on this romance drama, you bet A Big Bold Beautiful Journey in its lush cinematography (shot on Highway 5 in the state of California by the way; let’s give the production praise for that at least) and great Robbie-Farrell chemistry (they’re both great in the movie) would have found its way to a fall film festival, which is the type of launch this movie requires during a competitive adult Q3 and Q4 marketplace. Knock on wood for Warner Bros’ $130M budgeted Paul Thomas Anderson directed, Leonardo DiCaprio starring anarchist western One Battle After Another next weekend, which literally plays like Keanu Reeves’ Speed in pacing, has a current domestic projection around $20M, and skipped festivals. But, we’ve wrote this till we’re blue in the face: moviemaking is an art, not a science, and these packaged feature auctions are so fevered, that it’s to a movie’s detriment in the final accounting: The art once it’s hung on the wall doesn’t add up to the frenzy. And if you’re going to pull off an original risky movie, keep your costs as low as possible. In the same breath, any studio would have snapped at the Big Bold Beautiful Journey package: it was the project Robbie chose after delivering Warner Bros their highest grossing movie ever in Barbie ($1.44 billion worldwide) in addition to eight Oscar noms and one win. Big Bold Beautiful Journey also had a fellow Oscar nominated star in Farrell, and a hot, up-and-coming filmmaker was attached. While Robbie is known to produce most of what she stars in via her LuckyChap label, the 3x Oscar nominee preferred to simply act this time around, and backed a director she believed in.
Sony went as frugal as they could with a net $45M production cost, with co-financing of 30% from TSG after buying A Big Bold Beautiful Journey from 30West (U.S. rights) and NEON (foreign rights). Global marketing spend was under $20M. I understand it was an eight-week shoot with no complications in the spring-to-early summer of 2024, with additional photography in an attempt to make the move more commercial (more on that in a bit).
The screenplay by Seth Reiss which landed on the 2020 Black List with 14 votes (in a year when the top s script had 29 votes), was described by myriad sources as “beautiful.” Other studios passed because of the budget, observing its arthouse patina — which at the end of the day, is what this movie is: It’s more Sony Pictures Classics than Sony in its sophisticated discussion on two potential newfound lovers deliberating whether to roll the dice, and take the risk on a relationship after meeting at a wedding. At one point, I hear, Elisabeth Moss kicked the tires on the project, indicative of its indie sensibility. Farrell was attached before Robbie boarded as he had worked with Kogonada on A24’s 2021 A.I. sci-fi title After Yang (which made under $50K stateside, just over $745K worldwide).
The vital deal point at auction for this movie was that Kogonada received final cut. Some sources have told us that he was over his skis in making what was hoped to be a mass female-appealing film, but others greatly assert that the director is an epic visionary, and was supported by all, including Sony, in his deliberate choices. “He’s a painter,” praised one source.
Testing indicated that audiences had a problem with the pacing, it’s arguable chilly tone (though I thought it was quite warm), and the approach to the pic’s ending. Originally the movie had a May 9 release date before it was pushed to this weekend since it wasn’t ready. I’m told that Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group Chairman Tom Rothman and Kogonada teamed amicably to make the best edit possible; there wasn’t a contentious studio boss vs. filmmaker struggle going on.
The end result with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey was that it was a philosophically mired, meditative, stage-play-like-movie, not a happy-go-lucky Nancy Meyers-like mainstream romance movie which female moviegoers could sink their teeth into, evident in the pic’s exits. It even feels like a specialty title you’d see in Cannes. Many also argue that fantasy dramas are hard to pull off at the box office, and walk a fine line, read the Robin Williams 1998 bomb What Dreams May Come ($85 production cost, $55.3M domestic, $71.4M worldwide take) and Tim Burton’s 2003 Big Fish ($70M budget, $66M domestic, $122M-plus global take).
The joys of falling in love was a theme sold in the Sony trailer, complete with the Gracie Abrams “I Miss You, I’m Sorry” with the campaign echoing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in its one-sheets. While Sony pulled off a great social media campaign for the darkly toned It Ends With Us with Ryan Reynolds bombing junkets, flower pop stores at the Century City Mall, and Lively arranging flowers, again, many say that A Big Bold Beautiful Journey isn’t a comp to the Hoover movie given that title’s immediate TikTok faithful.
For Robbie and Farrell, who aren’t active on social media, Sony paired them up as they’ve done before with other co-stars (Zendaya and Tom Holland on Spider-Man, Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney on Anyone But You) to banter. It unfortunately didn’t set the world on fire.
Farrell appeared with Dude With a Sign at the movie’s NYC premiere.
Despite the movie having a social media reach per RelishMix at 266 million across TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook, and YouTube, 57% ahead of other romance movies, it was 21% behind It Ends With Us‘ 377 million reach, not to mention, a suspicious word of mouth was out there. Sadly, when a movie opens this low and is anticipated to be rejected by audiences, there’s no marketing solve.
Better days lie around the corner for Robbie and Farrell. She has Emerald Fennell’s smoldering feature take of classic Wuthering Heights with Jacob Elordi out around Valentine’s Day, while Farrell is already winning critical praise for his turn in Edward Berger’s Netflix title Ballad of a Small Player in the early awards season.
Meanwhile, Sony isn’t giving up on original movies aimed at women.
