Super flop for Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie
Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” was supposed to be the spectacular Oscar epic of the turn of the year – but US audiences hate the film.
Bad reviews: Brad Pitt (left) and Li Jun Li in Babylon.
Photo: Keystone
Brad Pitt as a great silent film heartthrob, Margot Robbie as a wild, aspiring starlet, sex orgies with naked people, dead people and circus elephants, film set disasters and an ode to Hollywood in the 1920s – Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” was to become the spectacular Oscar epic of the turn of the year. The German subtitle promises nothing less than the “intoxication of ecstasy”.
Studio Paramount believed in the $80 million extra-long film (running more than three hours) and brought it to more than 3,300 screens across the US over the Christmas holiday. However, the audience didn’t want to know anything about it – with a box office result of only 4.85 million US dollars at the start, “Babylon” is one of the biggest Hollywood flops in a long time.
Margot Robbie at the Babylon premiere in Los Angeles in mid-December.
Photo: Keystone
While an extreme snowstorm swept across much of the country, keeping potential moviegoers from leaving their homes, such a disastrous start can only have deeper causes. Reviews were poor, a mere 55 percent average on rottentomatoes.com, and viewers gave the film even more negative ratings, such as a C- on the Cinema Score post-screening survey.
In order to break even, the film would have to bring in 250 million dollars worldwide, which now seems hopeless. The five Golden Globe nominations the film already has, including Best Film Musical or Comedy, and Damien Chazelle’s Oscar-winning status for directing La La Land don’t help either. Whether the film will have a better fate in Switzerland and Germany will be seen when it starts on January 19th.
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