Shia LaBeouf has been big on making indie movies lately, and his new movie Man Down was never expected to have the prominence that a movie like Transformers had, for example. Regardless, after opening to $454,490 in the US shortly before the new year began, it seemed Man Down's debut in the UK would be at least decent. Recently, however, news broke that the move had only made enough to account for one ticket sold. And since we are getting close to the end of the movie's week-long run, we now have a better count of how many tickets Man Down is going to sell. It looks like the film may only sell a whopping three tickets.
Now, in some ways you should take this with a grain of salt. Man Down was given an exceptionally limited UK release, and is currently only playing in one theater in the town of Burnley. At that one theater, the movie is only being shown once a day. But to only sell three tickets across multiple days is fairly absurd, especially when you are considering the movie has a well-known cast. Along with Shia LaBeouf, Kate Mara, Gary Oldman and Jai Courtney also star.
In fact, the fact that only three tickets have sold, yielding £21or $26 bucks per THR, is actually confounding to the people who are running the Reel Cinema chain theater. It's not like anyone anticipated Man Down would be the biggest hit of the year, thus the small number of showings, but three tickets total is absolutely dismal. The manager, who is not revealing her name, says that the box office intake is unprecedented to say the least.
I think we've sold three tickets in total. [I haven't] experienced anything like it before.
The movie's run will come to an end this Thursday, which means that three tickets in total may be all that ends up being sold for the film. On the bright side, that represents a 200% increase from the other day, when only 1 ticket had been sold. On the not-so-bright side, the theater certainly did not make money on the flick, and the manager also noted it was "highly unlikely" that any more tickets would be sold in the final hours of Man Down's UK run.
Man Down didn't exactly get great reviews when it hit US box offices last winter. The movie follows a PTSD-ridden marine who is serving a tour in Afghanistan and who has a code with his son Jonathan "man down," that is meant to signify I love you. The twisty thriller has not been super well-received, but even movies that get bad reviews often make some money at the box office, which is exactly what happened when Man Down aired in the US. Apparently, UK audiences don't feel the same way. Here's what other--hopefully more exciting--movies are hitting the box office in the future.
