Ben Affleck Has A Nuanced Explanation For The Box Office Failure Of ‘The Last Duel’ & It’s Not Blaming Cellphones

As we approach the end of the year, we can safely look back at 2021 and see which films ended up being the biggest box office bombs. Sure, the pandemic is affecting the industry and perhaps some of the stats are skewed quite a bit, but when you see something like “The Last Duel” fail so spectacularly, there’s obviously something more going on than just people afraid to go back to the theater. Ben Affleck, one of the stars (and co-writer) of Ridley Scott’s epic, “The Last Duel,” thinks he has an answer for why the film failed financially.

READ MORE: ‘The Last Duel’: Ridley Scott Blames Millennials & “F*cking Cellphones” For The Bad Box Office

Recently, the question about why “The Last Duel” failed was posed to Scott himself. At the time, the filmmaker blamed the failure on Millennials and their “fucking cellphones.” That made for a good soundbite, but the explanation was lacking a bit in facts. Well, at a recent screening of his new film (via THR), “The Tender Bar,” Ben Affleck was asked the same question, in response to Scott’s answer, and he had a bit more of a detailed explanation.

“Ridley is at the stage in his career where, obviously, he’s completely unencumbered by concerns about what people think,” said Affleck.

That said, when talking about “The Last Duel,” Affleck does have an idea why that film didn’t do so well at the cinema. 

“Really, the truth is that I’ve had movies that didn’t work that bombed, that weren’t good. It’s very easy to understand that and why it happened. The movie is shit, people don’t want to see it, right?” explained Affleck. “This movie, ‘The Last Duel,’ I really like. It’s good and it plays — I saw it play with audiences and now it’s playing well on streaming. It wasn’t one of those films that you say, ‘Oh boy, I wish my movie had worked.’ Instead, this is more due to a seismic shift that I’m seeing, and I’m having this conversation with every single person I know. Though there are various iterations, the conversation is the same: How is [the movie business] changing?”

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He continued, “One of the fundamental ways it’s changing is that the people who want to see complicated, adult, non-IP dramas are the same people who are saying to themselves, ‘You know what? I don’t need to go out to a movie theater because I’d like to pause it, go to the bathroom, finish it tomorrow.’ It’s that, along with the fact that you can watch with good quality at home. It’s not like when I was a kid and the TV at home was an 11-inch black-and-white TV. I mean, you can get a 65-inch TV at Walmart for $130. There’s good quality out there and people are at home streaming in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. It’s all changed.”

Affleck’s insanely long answer to the question kept going, where he mentioned how the shift in the industry was happening before the pandemic. He brought up the lack of box office success for his 2019 film, “The Way Back,” which is another film that earned great reviews but didn’t resonate with an audience in theaters. However, Affleck was happy to know “The Way Back” was a hit on VOD and streaming. 

He also talked about how streaming services “are doing such great stuff. I mean, the content is spectacular. ‘Succession?’ Spectacular! ‘Ozark?’ Spectacular!” And because of the high quality, people are consuming more content than ever before, but a lot of that is at home. 

So, while he doesn’t blame Millennials as Ridley Scott did, Affleck is keen to point out how the industry is shifting and people are being conditioned to watch more content at home. And if you want to have as many eyes as possible on a project, that’s not always a bad thing.

His most recent film, “The Tender Bar,” is set to hit theaters on December 17 before hitting Amazon Prime Video on January 7, 2022.