17
votes
Apple Original Films’ ‘Argylle’ with C+ CinemaScore and near $17m opening isn’t cutting it at weekend box office
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- Authors
- Anthony D'Alessandro
- Published
- Feb 3 2024
- Word count
- 771 words
Despite all the bad reviews and first-impressions, I'm going to see it tomorrow most likely.
Will report back if it's fun. I expect it to be a "fun for the sake of fun" movie, with stuff making zero sense, so I'll suspend all my disbelief and just go with the flow without trying to find a meaning or a moral in it.
I just watched this. I was debating whether or not to watch it and what pushed me was this review from Katie Walsh from the LA Times:
Even with that setting my expectations it was worse than I could have imagined. And I didn't even hate the trailer as much as everyone else did.
I'm a fan of Matthew Vaughn, I liked the first two Kingsman movies (I LOVED the first one as I was 15 when it came out which was the perfect age for that). I loved Kick Ass when I was a kid, and X-Men First Class is still the best X-Men movie.
Seeing his career go this way over the last ten years, sticking with the Kingsman franchise for so long and now this? It is so sad to see. What makes it sadder is Guy Ritchie, his most obvious contemporary, is at least exploring genres and is, seemingly, more technically competent at this stage of their careers. Even something like Operation Fortune, which I didn't particularly care for, is miles ahead of this. And now Vaughn is gonna remakle his own Kick Ass and/or make Kingsman 3. Come on man, move on. Make something like Layer Cake again.
Actually, so much of this film reminds me of the stuff the RLM guys would watch on Best of the Worst. It has the production value of those films (despite costing 200M). It is the worst studio film to come out from the past, at least, five years but probably ten years. The screenplay is confused, non-sensical, the lead actress is miscast, and it is a disgustingly ugly movie from the shots to the CGI. Genuinely terrible. It makes The Marvels and Five Night's at Freddy's look good in comparison.
That claim immediately snagged my attention, it feels like a pretty extreme claim given how bad even big-budget movies can be. It almost, almost makes me morbidly curious. Not enough to go see it, but I did look up the Wikipedia summary, and... Yeesh, "convoluted" is an understatement. That's a lot of plot twists and shocking reveals for just two hours.
Now I'm curious about how many rewrites this went through. It feels like they started with one script, and then kept getting new ideas and running with them until it became something else entirely. The ending especially feels like they took an existing original script and tried to add it to another franchise, like the Cloverfield sequels. Out of curiosity, do you think the lead actress wouldn't have felt miscast if her character was more true to the trailers? Trying to figure out which "version" could have been the original.
Yeah the ending doesn’t make any sense. It contradicts the main premise of the film.
I think Bryce has a limited range. Shes great in The Village, 50/50, and The Help. She does better as the anxiety author, but she doesn’t have the physicality to pull off all the action sequences. Which is not a spoiler cause this is how they announced the movie lol.
The trailers looked fun for it, the concept feels fun and like it could be a good semi-mindless action flick. The one thing that's made me wary though is the cat. The CGI for it just feels so bad to me, and it's so prominent in the trailers. It gives me an uneasy feeling about the rest of the movie.
It was dumb as all hell, and I spent a lot of it with my head in my hands. And yet I enjoyed it.
Is it fun? I just want to see it if it's fun.
Yeah, who cares about box office, ultimately? Even producers should think twice about it, too. Many movies flopped financially 100% because of external factors (like marketing), not their quality or allure, and could do great given another chance or a faithful sequel for instance.
Alas, it doesn't seem like Argylle is fun. I've heard a rumor of AI-written dialogues, too.
I am hesitant to believe rumors like that without proof. It feels like every movie will have that rumor mill from people that don't like it.
Now if there are receipts that'll toss it into my "don't watch" bin for sure. But it could just be cliche writing
From a quick browse on IMDB, it seems it's just nonsensical, mindless fun with no other purpose - which most critics (and people inclined to leaving reviews online) hate with a passion, but I personally like.
To be clear the Cinemascore is a snapshot of audience reactions, normal people not a self selected group. C+ indicates no ones really liking this.
I think people who see movies on opening weekend are a self-selected group already, particularly ones that aren't big releases or well marketed.
This had a relatively large marketing budget behind it (Apple & Universal spent 80M on it) and is a big release. But that's why audience scores tend to be inflated. Because when we look at grades people go "oh C+ is passing" when here it means "this is is terrible." For franchise films it's even more inflated so like a B is a bad score cause fan rush happens on opening weekend and if Rise of Skywalker couldn't get a score in the A range you know it's bad.
So I guess maybe it is self selected, but not "people who leave reviews online and want to be film critics" self selected. It's not like we're talking about Letterboxd users or something.
I do live under a rock, but I'd never heard of this movie. Which doesn't mean a lot but all I'm really trying to say is that the over/under for how many movies watched a year for people who saw this on opening weekend is probably quite higher than average. Their thoughts on the film are going to be quite different than someone who fires up Apple TV+ and sees a new movie they've never heard of.
I think I understand what you’re saying but the thing with these films is that they don’t do well in those secondary markets either. Not typically anyway. Because that word of mouth spreads to the point people don’t think it’s worth their time.
This was a bigger movie, but a bomb like The Flash also doesn’t do well on those markets because of how poorly it was received.
That’s not your main point. But I’ll just go ahead and say, again, they’re mostly normal people. They’re not film connoisseurs. They’re not the types of people that would say “oh the third act was weak” or whatever. What they’re stating is if the film met their expectations or if they liked it. This is the reason horror movies like Hereditary gets scores in the D range.
Theres no real point in trying to triangulate this to make it seem like the common man would like it. These are the common men.
Perhaps not self-described, but they not? I wonder what percentage of movies are still watched in theaters to start with, never mind on the opening weekends. Which is more to what I was getting at -- people who pay $40 all in to watch this movie are going to have different expectations (and rightfully so) than for people where it shows up in their $15/mo catalog.
They are not lol. This back and forth is killing me. I often have to explain these audience scores but this is the first time I’ve had someone be adamant that the golden standard for audience scores is actually not representative.
I get it’s a common thing for people to be like “what do critics know, this is a fun movie.” And there are many cases where audiences like the movie critics didn’t. But for some reason it’s hard for those same people to grasp when a movie is disliked by both critics and audiences especially when it’s an action-comedy.
Like there’s not really any other proof to give. So there’s nothing for me to say to the argument of “well what if someone puts it on while they scroll TikTok through it.”
Just to be clear, I could care less about this movie or how well it's liked.
But it definitely isn't representative -- that doesn't necessarily mean it can't be useful but I don't see how you can claim what is essentially a biased and very small advanced polling sample as representative of anything.
It can be fun, I'll have to check it out when I get a chance
Rotten tomatoes listed argyle audience score as 71%. So sounds like maybe it could be fun. The audience score is more indicative of this type of movies then the critics score.
Verified audience score. 71 is not a good score for this type of film. I know I sound repetitive, but Audrian scores are something a lot of people. Don’t know how to read this type of film, when audience is really love it it’s like 90+ easily and even a score in the 80s is considered not good.
Anecdotally, I'd never heard of this movie and I'm totally going to watch this movie now that I know about it.
Yes. I just watched it and it was a good time. Based on the trailer, I knew what to expect. Matthew Vaughn directed this and I like the Kingsman movies. So I figured I'd enjoy this and I did.
As another opinion it is objectively stupid and too long.
I am still glad I saw it. It’s unique and has rough edges and is in desperate need of some scene editing but it’s the right kind of dumb
Such a shame, it looked fun. I miss the fun secret agent action genre. And after that buddy cop resurgence, please.
I got caught up in the could-be-taylor-swift book for about ten minutes then gave the thing a read. Not a great book, but good if you're trapped in an airport, a plane, prison, or someone is going to kill you unless you read the book... otherwise, don't bother. It's a half-baked Dan Brown knock off and I feel was written as a quick and dirty cash grab, hoping the movie would be big.
I'm still going to watch the movie, but its a shame the book wasn't better. The book is on the level of Bad Twin for those of you who were DEEP into LOST.
Whoever decided to go with that haircut for Henry…
I feel like a lot of people will wait for the Apple TV+ release on this one. Looks interesting enough but not enough for tickets the way they are these days.
I guess maybe Taylor Swift should stick to song writing after all. (Kidding, in case that is not obvious)