‘Argylle’ Box Office: Does a Big-Budget Bomb Still Count as Such if It Came From a Streamer?

On how much of a curve should we grade the theatrical performance of these streaming-intended tentpoles, especially when they aren't exactly prestige pictures?

Argylle topped the domestic Friday box office with a $6.5 million gross. That included $1.7 million in Thursday previews and – noting lousy reviews (35% rotten and 5/10 on Rotten Tomatoes) and a C+ Cinemascore grade – points to an opening weekend closer to $16.5 million than $18 million. Yes, this $200 million-budgeted Apple original (or at least that’s what Apple paid to acquire the film in its development stages) isn’t quite playing by the same rules as a “make money in theaters” multiplex release, with Universal serving as a theatrical distributor just did Sony for Napoleon and Paramount for Flowers of the Killer Moon. However, it is still a poorly received, mega-budget would-be franchise-starting action comedy that will almost certainly not spawn a franchise.

If this were a mega-budget theatrical release from a legacy studio, and Universal is only on the hook for distribution costs, we’d be all correctly declaring the film, about a spy novelist who gets thrust into a comic adventure frightingly similar to her own seemingly fictional espionage stories, to be a huge box office bomb and a brazen miscalculation of the realities of the theatrical marketplace. That it came from a deep-pocketed streamer complicates the narrative while raising the question on which how much of a curve these films should be commercially graded. While theaters and theatrical advocates are greater for the content, letting the streamers off the hook is partially how we got into this mess.

It will also open lower (and will presumably earn less theatrically) than Jason Statham’s $35 million The Beekeeper. If we (correctly) declared Guy Ritchie’s (also Henry Cavill-starring) The Man from U.N.C.L.E. to be a theatrical whiff upon earning $110 million on a $75 million budget, then what do we make of Matthew Vaughn’s frankly inferior spy-centric action comedy opening with a guestimated/projected $35 million worldwide on a $200 million budget?