Focus Features hasn’t had many films break out in theaters since the pandemic began, save for the likes of Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” and a few others. But there’s a huge difference between a film not finding an audience and a film debuting to tumbleweeds on more than 1,000 screens in North America. That’s precisely what happened with “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” a movie that got straight-up buried and died a quick death at the box office.
Hailing from writer/director Kobi Libii, the film opened in March against “Arthur the King” while also contending with the likes of “Dune: Part Two” and “Kung Fu Panda 4.” But it even lost to smaller movies like “One Life” on opening weekend, making just $1.3 million in its debut and being pulled from theaters after three weeks. It ultimately made just $2.5 million in total, with no international box office to speak of, and was largely panned by critics (sitting at just 28% on Rotten Tomatoes), which certainly didn’t help matters. But the bigger problem is that the exceedingly poor performance theatrically killed any hope down the line.
The VOD business model is sort of predicated on the idea that a theatrical release can help advertise the movie’s eventual home video release. The problem is, when a movie flops this bad, there’s little advertising done. The only thing that happens is a slew of articles (not unlike this one) pointing out that the movie flopped. Even if a viewer gets curious enough to Google the film, they’re most likely to see that unflattering Rotten Tomatoes score first.
All of this to say, this movie has nothing going for it from a pure dollars and cents point of view. The budget was never revealed publicly but unless it was made for a sock full of nickels, it was a huge misfire. This is the kind of flop all studios hope to avoid at all costs. Not all movies are going to work, that’s just the nature of the beast. But this is a “people might get fired” kind of bomb.
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