Clint Eastwood's Movie Bombs at Weekend Box Office
by EG
With no overt patriotism or manly hero to lure conservative audiences, Richard Jewell flopped over the weekend, giving Clint Eastwood the worst directorial opening of his career. The movie was also possibly hurt by a controversy stemming from the filmmaker's changing of a key element of the true story to make it adhere to a controversial sexist cliche. Read on for details.
Via Page Six.
Clint Eastwood’s new film about the 1996 Olympics bombing marked his worst box office opening as a director amid controversy about the portrayal of a female reporter.
“Richard Jewell,” which depicts a security guard falsely accused of being involved in the bomb plot, pulled in a dismal $5 million from 2,502 theaters over the weekend, according to The Wrap.
The results could be the worst nationwide opening for the 89-year-old director since 1980’s “Bronco Billy,” which garnered $3.7 million.
We'll be looking at the Atlanta Olympic terrorist bombing next week in #HIS2133 (carried out by anti-abortion terrorist Eric Rudolph).
— Alison Meek (@Aly_Meek) November 22, 2019
Richard Jewell, the subject of Eastwood's new film, was the early hero then wrongly-accused villain of the attack.https://t.co/UM8fxwJiZt
In comparison, Eastwood’s 2014 “American Sniper” earned $89 million in its opening weekend while his 2016 film “Sully” raked in $35 million.
The 1996 Summer Olympics bombing. Eric Rudolph was an anti-abortion extremist and set the bomb to make a “statement” against government's sanctioning of "abortion on demand.”
— Stacey E. Singleton (@staceyNYCDC) October 27, 2018
The tepid opening comes after an Atlanta newspaper demanded the studio issue a statement saying it used dramatic license when portraying a reporter sleeping with a source to break a story.
The newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, told Variety that the allegation that former reporter Kathy Scruggs bedded an FBI agent to learn that a security guard was under investigation for the Centennial Olympic Park bombing is baseless.
“We hereby demand that you immediately issue a statement publicly acknowledging that some events were imagined for dramatic purposes and artistic license and dramatization were used in the film’s portrayal of events and characters,” the newspaper wrote to Warner Bros., Eastwood and writer Billy Ray.
Get the rest of the story at Page Six.
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