Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Just over a year ago, Kevin Spacey was celebrating the release of his film, “Baby Driver.” The Edgar Wright-directed crime thriller brought in $21 million in its first weekend. But over the ensuing months, Spacey’s star status took an apparently irreparable hit, with allegations of sexual assault. The actor joined Harvey Weinstein as the poster boys for the abusers in Hollywood.
And this past weekend, Spacey’s latest film, “Billionaire Boys Club,” was released in a scattered 11 theaters across the country and opened with a historically-low box office total. According to estimates, “Billionaire Boys Club” pulled in a total of $618 in its first three days of release, with a remarkably low $126 in its first day. No, I didn’t forget to type “millions” after those numbers. Ouch.
Some quick math will really put this all into perspective. If you take the per-theater-average for the weekend, Spacey’s film earned just over $56 at each location. Take the nationwide average ticket price of just over $9, and you see that just about 6 people went to see the film at each theater over the entire weekend. Of course, there’s no way of knowing how many screenings were done at each location, but it’s fair to say that there were some empty theaters showing ‘BBC.’
For those not familiar with the film, Spacey starred as a crooked businessman who becomes entangled with some upstart financial hotshots that created the titular group. The film is based on a true story and starred Taron Egerton, Ansel Elgort, and Spacey. “Billionaire Boys Club” was expected to be a fairly major release when it was in production, but the controversy surrounding one of its stars quickly shelved the film and forced the under-the-radar release.
While this is definitely an anomaly, and a fun tidbit to share with your box office nerd friends, we can’t really use this as a precedent for future films starring people accused of abuse. What happened to “Billionaire Boys Club” is definitely not proof that every Spacey film for the rest of time is DOA, but it does show that the #MeToo movement is able to greatly affect a person’s star power, and in the case of Spacey, make him the butt of some jokes.