Why Charlie’s Angels Just Bombed So Hard

1. Charlie's Muddled Marketing

Ostensibly, you're looking at a movie aimed at a female audience from 13 to 39. It's not an action movie, so you cut off that part of the audience. In order to really make money, it needed to activate its key audience and the area it should have focused on most was social media. But the stars of the movie - beyond the director - have limited presence on social media. Given how active the key demographic are on social media, that's an almighty loss and it's no real surprise that Sony have now vowed to scale back advertising heavily. Who can blame them? It wasn't working anyway.

It's slightly unfair, but the marketing campaign was completely overshadowed by the idea that the movie was going to be a "woke" iteration of the IP. It was a suggestion that was IMMEDIATELY leapt on by a toxic side of the film community and alienated the valuable action movie audience, who - wrongly - seemed to assume that they were going to be the film's targets. This was, for some reason, turned into another Ghostbusters reboot by people more interested in their expectations of being "triggered" than in ever judging it for its actual qualities.

Elizabeth Banks was forced to openly reassure the intended audience that it was still going to be funny, as if the suggestion of a film's progressiveness meant that it fundamentally couldn't be entertaining. There's something deeply broken there and not least because Banks had to come out and plead with people to give it a chance. Reviews suggest Kristen Stewart is very funny in it, but that doesn't matter now, because the woke label pulled it down into the deep.

Looking at the release slate, it's hard to suggest that competition was going to be a major problem for Sony, because Charlie's Angels opened against The Good Liar (hardly a box office powerhouse, no matter the talent involved) and James Mangold's Ford V Ferrari. Typically, that sort of historical story would be decent, but wouldn't trouble a franchise IP. That's been the story of the summer, at least, as original movies have been strangled by franchises, so you'd usually expect the same.

But Ford V Ferrari has opened far better than projected with a 30% higher initial box office haul than predicted and an A+ CinemaScore. And in comparison to Charlie's Angels, it looks like a real winner.

Taking all of this and removing any rave reviews from the picture and it's very clear why Charlie's Angels lost at the box office. It's a movie that no fan asked for. That no existing fan would be able to recognise as the thing they love. That nobody beyond people looking to make money from a recognisable brand would ever have made. It's a shame, but that looks to be the way it is.

Have you seen Charlie's Angels? What did you think?