Ron Howard’s “Eden” finally arrived in theaters this weekend — two months after it leaked online and nearly a year since its TIFF premiere.
The journey for this film has been bumpy on this one and the results are exactly what most expected: muted. Vertical released the survival drama, but it only grossed $1M — not great. Deadline is busy spinning the numbers, insisting the $1M opening isn’t a bomb (for reasons only they seem to buy), while Variety’s Brett Lang is calling it what it is: a bomb.
The budget for this one was apparently $55M, per Deadline. It took eight months post-TIFF before Vertical scooped it up. The tepid critical reception (55% on Rotten Tomatoes) certainly didn’t help. Still, Vertical decided to send the movie into theaters on a 30-day exclusive window before PVOD.
Overseas, the picture is already banking on home viewing — an Amazon deal is said to be tackling half of foreign markets — with AGC managing to raise $26M out of Cannes last year. The cast alone makes the title attractive for a streamer, regardless of the theatrical showing.
Honestly, when it lacked distribution, I was holding out hope that Netflix would come in and scoop it up. “Eden” is exactly the kind of mid-budget star-driven guilty pleasure drama that would’ve quietly pulled big numbers on their platform.
As for the film itself, “Eden” recounts the true story of European settlers attempting to build a utopian community on the Galápagos post-WWI, only to collapse under the weight of jealousy, lust, and ambition. The cast is loaded (Ana de Armas, Vanessa Kirby, Jude Law, Sydney Sweeney, Daniel Brühl), but the movie itself was never going to break out theatrically.
It’s an unusually savage film for Howard — a director more associated with uplift than this type of descent into madness. But there’s something luridly watchable about it, a guilty-pleasure energy that almost plays like “Survivor” meets “Lord of the Flies” by way of WWII-era colonial escapism.
De Armas goes full villain here, playing a baroness so toxic she makes everyone else look reasonable by comparison. She chews the scenery with gusto. It’s also a starry prestige effort that ultimately failed to find critical or commercial acclaim.