What went wrong with this one?
Earlier this year, Sony delayed Kogonada’s “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” from its original May release to September 19, 2025. The move seemed designed to line it up with a fall festival premiere — TIFF felt like the obvious bet. Instead, the film bypassed the circuit altogether. At the time it raised eyebrows, given Kogonada’s pedigree, and now we know why.
The review embargo has just lifted and the notices aren’t good: “Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is sitting at a 39 on Metacritic. Even worse for Sony, the film is tracking toward a $7-8M opening weekend. That’s a disaster considering the studio paid $50M to acquire the “hot package” at EFM 2024, not to mention the $60M+ production budget. Call it Sony’s $110M blunder.
Sony’s rollout has been puzzlingly muted. Marketing has been practically non-existent, and judging by today’s tracking and critical reception, it seems like they’ve quietly given up on the project. The first trailer, dropped in June, promised Kogonada’s trademark visual elegance — Benjamin Loeb (“Mandy”) shot the film — but leaned heavily into sugary sentimentality. There’s been no excitement over this one.
The film doesn’t exactly help itself commercially either — it’s rated R, cutting off the broader audience that might have helped a romance starring Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell. The story, about two strangers who meet at a wedding and embark on a GPS-guided, time-bending road trip, has been pitched as “an imaginative tale of two strangers and the unbelievable journey that connects them.”
What went wrong? The talent involved was there in spades, it was even written by “The Menu” scribe Seth Reiss, it had all the trappings of an artful crossover hit. Instead, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” looks like Kogonada’s first major misstep, and Sony stands to lose a lot of money out of this one.
Kogonada is the video essayist-turned-filmmaker who broke through with 2017’s quietly beautiful “Columbus,” and followed that with the 2021 sci-fi drama “After Yang,” which premiered at Cannes 2021, and also starred Farrell. Watch him go back to indie filmmaking after this blunder.
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