Another stinker for Sony.
Things aren’t looking good for Kogonada’s “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” which earned only $400k in Thursday previews and barely made $1M on Friday. Despite stars Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie’s best efforts to promote this thing, it’s headed for a $3–4M opening — one of the biggest bombs of the year.
Sure, the reviews have been terrible — “Big Bold Beautiful Journey” currently sits at 41 on Metacritic — but audience scores haven’t been good either. That B– CinemaScore is weak, and that’s with a 64% user rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Sony paid $50M for the “hot package” at EFM 2024, on top of a production budget north of $60M. (Sony, which tends to underreport its budgets, claims it was just $45M.) All told, it’s shaping up to be another misfire for the studio.
The rollout hasn’t helped. Marketing has been strangely muted, almost as if the studio quietly gave up. The first trailer, dropped in June, showcased Benjamin Loeb’s (“Mandy”) cinematography and Kogonada’s visual elegance, but leaned hard into sugary sentimentality. Buzz never materialized.
Commercially, the film doesn’t do itself any favors either. It carries an R rating — a tough sell for a romance, even one headlined by Robbie and Farrell. The story, about two strangers who meet at a wedding and embark on a GPS-guided, time-bending road trip, was pitched as “an imaginative tale of two strangers and the unbelievable journey that connects them.”
The talent was undeniable: Robbie, Farrell, Kogonada, and a script from “The Menu” writer Seth Reiss. Yet instead of prestige or breakout potential, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” looks like Kogonada’s first real stumble — and a failure Sony would like to quickly forget.
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.