Critics praised it, but acclaimed filmmaker Robert Eggers’ third feature – the Viking epic “The Northman” – has come to be defined by its underperformance.
Eggers prior films were notable low-budget success stories – “The Witch” scoring $40 million from a $4 million budget and excellent reviews, whilst “The Lighthouse” made a decent $18 million from an $11 million budget and scored rave reviews.
“The Northman” however tried something different – keeping Eggers’ esoteric arthouse style but giving it proper mid-budget movie financing in the $70-90 million range. Thus the film would need to hit above the $200 million range to be considered a hit.
It ended up grossing just $64.9 million theatrically worldwide with an even split between domestic and international. In a recent interview with The Daily Beast, Eggers was asked about the film’s underwhelming box office and said:
“I think it met the expectations of a bad marketplace. Am I disappointed that, three to four weeks in, we’re on VOD because that’s the way things are done in the post-COVID world? Yeah. But it’s doing great on VOD, so there you go.”
It may have been a high profile casualty, but many non-blockbuster films have tanked in theatrical releases in recent months with only the odd success story exception such as “Everything Everywhere All at Once”.
Eggers also spoke about he could avoid such a situation happening again and reaffirmed one thing he won’t be doing is directing a comic book film:
“I need to restrategize in terms of what I’m pitching to a studio. Like, how do I be me and survive in this environment? Because while they wouldn’t have me anyway, I wouldn’t want to direct a Marvel movie, and I’m also not going to try to get the rights to ‘Spawn’ or something either.
I’m going to keep doing what I’m going to do, but I know that everybody’s nervous right now, you know? Everybody’s nervous. And it’s justifiable.
That said, me and my collaborators stuck together, and we just said we were simply not going to leave with something we weren’t proud of. So, we did. But certainly, there were times when that was difficult in post-production.”
Eggers has previously discussed in various interviews his frustrations and conflicts in post-production with the studio over the film’s final cut. The film hit VOD on May 13th and will hit Peacock on June 6th.
