Box Office: 'Hustlers' Has Become A Very Important Movie For STX Entertainment – Forbes

In trailers that will probably not play in front of The Lion King, STX Entertainment dropped the first look at Hustlers. The film features a pretty stacked cast (Constance Wu, Jennifer Lopez, Keke Palmer, Julia Stiles, Lili Reinhart, Lizzo And Cardi B) and a classic “ripped from the headlines” high concept. Written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, concerns several strippers who concoct a scheme to rob their rich, entitled White Street-affiliated clientele just after the “Great Recession” began a decade ago.
Hustlers is just the sort of thing that STX Entertainment was supposed to specialize in, namely meat-and-potato studio programmers with grown up movie stars in cast-to-type starring roles. And after a few misses and some unexpected delays, it’s up to this one to show that they can still do what they set out to do five years ago. Granted, part of their challenges is due to, say it with me now, the demographics for old-school and star-driven “movie movies” vacating movie theaters and streaming their non-franchise/non-tentpole entertainment content.
But that doesn’t explain spending $45 million on an Ugly Dolls movie, or a lackluster reception to Poms which netted about as much ($13.6 million domestic) as Paramount’s demographically-similar Book Club earned on its opening weekend just a year prior. While they had a few wins, like I Feel Pretty ($48 million domestic and $94 million worldwide on a $32 million budget) and Den of Thieves ($80 million worldwide on a $35 million budget) in early 2018, the likes of The Happytime Murders, Mile 22 and Peppermint left much to be desired.
The good news is that they had two big wins at the end of 2018 and the start of 2019. Jennifer Lopez’ Second Act was one of the leggiest movies of the last Christmas season, earning $39.282 million domestic and $72.28 million worldwide from a $6.4 million debut and on a $16 million budget. And The Upside, which they distributed after the Weinstein Company imploded just after its debut at the Toronto Film Festival in September of 2018, went out as a rejiggered PG-13 movie and vastly over-performed, earning $108 million domestic from a $20 million debut.
The Upside, which starred Kevin Hart, Bryan Cranston and Nicole Kidman, was a remake of the blockbuster French melodrama The Intouchables ($422 million worldwide in 2011/2012), and it ended up as their second-biggest domestic grosser after Bad Moms ($113 million in 2016). Even if you argue that I’m being unfair to them (god knows I’ve been rooting for them since the start), they are currently (so sayeth The Wrap) attempting to procure capital or merge with a larger company. But it’s tough to sell yourself when you have neither a bunch of recent splashy hits nor a deep library.
Moreover, several top executives, including Oren Aviv, Chief Operating Officer Tom McGrath and chief brand officer Patti Röckenwagner, have left this year. Again, to be fair, the struggles of the so-called “middle class movie,” studio and star-driven projects that cost between $20 million and $80 million, are not unique to STX (RIP, Open Road, Broad Green, Film District, etc.). Lionsgate’s (very good) Long Shot would have been a solid hit maybe five years ago, and the likes of Annapurna’s (excellent) Book Smart and Amazon’s (rock solid) Late Night would have a chance in hell of thriving alongside the tentpoles.
And even if you argue that STX’s movies aren’t as good as they could/should be (and I will defend Valerian, The Foreigner and Second Act among other recent offerings), that itself is a relatively new problem. When theatrical moviegoing was the main place for filmed entertainment and/or “an evening out” options, it mattered a lot less that, random examples, Maid in Manhattan ($155 million worldwide in 2002 on a $55 million budget) or Vantage Point ($151 million in 2008 on a $41 million budget) were merely “okay” movies. Some of this is self-inflicted (again, Ugly Dolls, really?) and some of this is the nature of the marketplace.
In a time when moviegoers only go to the movies for “events,” even if event movies can be as big as Avengers: Endgame or as small as Us, STX’s core problem over the last few years is that, with the exception of Bad Moms, none of their films (the ones I liked and the ones I didn’t) were remotely “events” to general moviegoers. And now STX is coming off a couple of high profile (and expensive) misses, delaying their movies (The Boy 2, Chadwick Boseman’s 21 Bridges, Dave Bautista’s My Spy, the latter two of which look quite good) left and right and losing the next Jennifer Lopez rom-com (Marry Me, co-starring Owen Wilson) to Universal.
It makes a high-profile flick like Hustlers that much more important. I don’t want to be too hyperbolic and say that Hustlers is a do or die release for the company, as they have made money from most of their releases since The Gift in 2015. But a big and splashy adult-skewing hit would go a long way toward convincing people with money to either give some of that money to STX or consider merging with or buying the company outright. As someone who quite likes the cast (yes, I watch Riverdale and I’m longtime Palmer fan from Akeelah and the Bee) and liked Lorene Scafaria’s The Meddler, I’m hoping for the best.
I’ve said before that I believe that STX Entertainment was probably the last remotely successful “new” theatrical distribution company we were ever going to see. Considering how much even the likes of Lionsgate, Sony and Paramount are struggling in a world where adults don’t see adult movies in theaters and star power barely means a thing without a valid IP/franchise behind it, well, it’ll take more than an occasional Bad Moms or The Upside to change the narrative. Hustlers opens September 16, 2019, just two weeks before 21 Bridges (originally slated for last weekend) debuts. Here’s hoping I’m eating crow on September 30.

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