The star-packed female spy action thriller “The 355” has pretty much bombed on arrival.
A passion project for one of its stars Jessica Chastain, the Simon Kinberg-directed $40 million feature scored just a $4.8 million opening over the weekend and debuted in third place.
That’s well behind the $33 million that “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and $12 million that “Sing 2” scored this weekend – films that have both been playing for weeks now. “Sing 2” also just became available on PVOD, 17 days after its release in theaters, at the higher premium price of $24.99 to rent.
The 355’s reviews did not help, the movie scoring just a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes and a fairly ordinary B+ CinemaScore. The poor showing comes amidst a surge in COVID-19 cases due to the infectious omicron variant. Most of the film’s audience still skewed older with 80% of ticket holders over 35.
Penelope Cruz, Fan Bingbing, Diane Kruger and Lupita Nyong’o star in the film which marks the first Hollywood studio release of 2022. As it is a Universal title with a soft opening, it will likely hit PVOD platforms in 17 days – meaning it could be made available online as early as the week of January 24th. Universal hasn’t announced any date for its digital launch as yet though.
Meanwhile one of the film’s co-stars, Sebastian Stan, spoke about the film on Extra and revealed he and Edgar Ramirez got in even better shape than usual to do shirtless scenes for the movie – scenes which ended up on the cutting room floor and which he hopes will surface in outtakes from the film one day.
Source: THR
