Why Paramount Risked (and Lost) So Much Money on Better Man
In light of the abject and crushing box-office failure of Paramount’s Robbie Williams biographical jukebox musical, Better Man, last weekend, the question around Hollywood was not so much: Why didn’t audiences turn out to see a deliriously artful, $110 million, R-rated pop biopic plotted around a singing, dancing, cocaine-snorting CGI chimpanzee? Industry observers were left scratching their heads, instead asking: Who in their right mind would even think they could make any money whatsoever releasing a deliriously artful, $110 million, R-rated pop biopic plotted around a singing, dancing, cocaine-snorting CGI chimpanzee? (Let alone one that portrays a British superstar practically no one in America has ever heard of.)
Over its opening three days in 1,291 North American theaters, Better Man pulled in a dismal $1.2 million. To put that figure in perspective, the movie failed to crack the top ten and was bested by the gossamer-thin, Pamela Anderson–starring art-house indie The Last Showgirl (production budget: $2 million), which debuted in a mere 870 locations yet still managed to pull in $1.5 million. While tracing the career arc, mental-health challenges, and descent into substance abuse of Williams — the former lead singer of the British boy band Take That, a 1990s–’00s tabloid mainstay, and European superstar who was something like the Harry Styles of his day — Better Man transcends mere pop hagiography thanks to the batshit filmmaking audacity of director Michael Gracey (of The Greatest Showman fame). And therein lies Better Man’s second bitterest irony. While flopping commercially, the movie arrives as a critical triumph, currently standing at 89 percent “fresh” on the Tomatometer — way higher than the 2019 Elton John biographical musical Rocketman, the Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody, and the recent Bob Marley biopic One Love — with an even higher audience approval rating (91 percent on the Popcornmeter) in no small part due to its partial fictionalization of Williams’s life story through presenting him as an alcoholic, egomaniac, anthropomorphic chimp.
Even more stinging, the film has commercially fizzled across the singer’s native U.K. and Europe, where he remains a top touring act (drawing in $10.5 million internationally, to date). Which leads us to Better Man’s bitterest irony: All anecdotal evidence suggests the movie flopped precisely because the Williams-as-mo-cap-chimp conceit was just too highbrow to put butts in seats. “When I saw the trailer, I thought it was a Planet of the Apes musical,” one industry observer tells me. “People just couldn’t get past the monkey,” adds another studio executive. “It’s too weird. It’s like, What the fuck?”
In an IP-dominated cinematic era when sequels, spinoffs, and reboots rule the multiplex, Better Man was more than just an original-concept outlier with a nine-figure price tag. “It was so high-concept that people couldn’t grasp it, which made it exponentially tougher to market,” says Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “People say studios are heartless machines that only care about the bottom line. If that were true, you wouldn’t get a movie like Better Man.”
In February 2024 — just months removed from the resolution of debilitating twin Hollywood strikes and with the studio-movie supply chain still in shambles — Paramount paid $25 million for North American distribution rights to Better Man, which was independently financed and partially funded by an Australian government incentive program (testament to Williams’s abiding popularity Down Under). Implicit in that move: Studios were facing a decimated release calendar due to production shutdowns and delays at the beginning of last year. And despite the absence of clear-cut “comps” (as previously released films used to estimate a new film’s projected profitability are known), some C-suite honchos, like Paramount CEO Brian Robbins, clearly felt a big swing like Better Man was the best worst option at the time.
Its price tag, however, was too high. “The film was independently produced with an est. budget of $110 million,” veteran box-office analyst David A. Gross notes in his industry newsletter, FranchiseRe. “That’s an enormous amount of money for a vision like this. The risk-taking is excellent, but $110m is not realistic for the genre or the musical artist. $25 to $30 million would have made more sense.”
Compounding matters, Los Angeles audiences were expected to be among Better Man’s main domestic box-office drivers. But the satirical-anthropo-musical reached screens last weekend just as devastating wildfires were engulfing the city. And while the conflagrations did not result in widespread theater closures, Angelenos stayed away from the movies en masse.
But with Paramount yet to open the film in Japan in France, and to use the topically gratuitous metaphor, Better Man’s monkey could still swing (on streaming services if not theatrically). Gracey’s most notable credit, the 2018 P.T. Barnum musical biopic The Greatest Showman, was dead on box-office arrival but slowly and gradually built up steam to become a sleeper hit. “This is my blanket statement for any movie that has great reviews and solid audience scores: Don’t count it out yet,” Dergarabedian says. “We need to give this movie a chance. The Greatest Showman is an example of a film that was somewhat marginalized and disregarded and had legs.”
“Here’s the other thing: Movies that play like this that get more attention than box office in theaters wind up doing extraordinarily well on streaming,” he continues. “Because people have heard about them but didn’t necessarily want to go out to see them. I heard about that monkey movie and I want to check it out.”
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