Ridley Scott’s wrong to blame millennials for his box office bombshell – but he’s right to be angry

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Maybe we as a culture don’t deserve good things. For years, we’ve lamented the creative inertia of the modern blockbuster – the glut of tasteless shows, CGI superheroes, and “known IPs” that has all but shut out big-budget adult films from the market. So when a movie like The Last Duel comes along, it should have been an oasis in the desert.

A medieval triptych directed by Ridley Scott, the film follows the real-life story of Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), two nobles who fought to the death in France in the 14th century after the wife of Carrouges Marguerite (Jodie Comer) accuses Le Gris of rape.

The same events are recounted three times, each segment of the film being presented as “The Truth According to [Carrouges/Le Gris/Marguerite]”. The film’s three stars are all formidable, each turning in a carefully distinct performance. The duel itself is brutal and utterly captivating. The script is skillful in the way it recontextualizes events, carefully omitting scenes that might have corroborated or contradicted parts of other characters’ accounts.

However, there is no ambiguity about sexual violence at its core: in its moral message, The Last Duel is strong and unambiguous. And yet this pretty brilliant and decidedly adult-oriented film has recouped less than a third of its $ 100million (£ 75million) budget since its release in October. This is one of the biggest flops of Scott’s career.

Those who championed the film have scrutinized the failure on social media, with many suggesting that Disney’s marketing campaign was at fault. (The Last Duel received the nod from Fox before the studio merged with Disney in 2019; some have claimed that the adult subject of the film would have been at odds with the Disney brand.) Too few people have been made aware of the subject of the film, people claimed – or that it even existed at all. Speaking to Marc Maron on the WTF podcast this week, Scott strongly supported the studio, saying that Disney “did a fantastic job of promoting” and that “the bosses loved the movie,” despite his concerns that it wasn’t was “not for them”. Instead, Scott blamed millennials squarely on Millennials. “I think it comes down to,” he said, “what we have today, [are] the audience that was raised on those fucking cell phones. Millennials never want to learn anything unless told to you on a cell phone.

There are plenty of holes to dig in this somewhat incoherent notion; no less than “millennium” is not the watchword for a young technician passionate about the technology that he was. The youngest of Generation Y are in their twenties. The oldest are already 40 years old. Millennials are no longer your hipster nephew; she’s your nice aunt. Plus, millennials have also been some of The Last Duel’s loudest social media champions – on the contrary, they’re exactly who this inflected #MeToo movie resonated with the most.

The real reasons for The Last Duel’s box office death are, in all likelihood, much more mundane. There is the pandemic, on the one hand, from which the film industry has not yet fully recovered. And, while it’s true that many people have undoubtedly avoided the theatrical release to wait for its quick arrival on Disney Plus (next week), medieval drama isn’t exactly a booming genre right now. Plus, the film’s sexually violent subject matter was clearly going to put some people off.

Additionally, The Last Duel was rated “18” by the BBFC (“R” in the US) – which tends to cap the commercial viability of any film. It was also released the same week as the latest installment in the Halloween Kills slasher franchise and the sequel to Venom. Then there’s the inevitable fact that No Time to Die hit theaters just two weeks earlier and still monopolized screens everywhere; Dune was released a week later. The idea that a $ 100 million Scott and Damon epic would be unable to squeeze more than two screenings a day in a multiplex seems inconceivable, but given the competition it was, in many places, the case.

Nonetheless, it would be wrong to dismiss Scott’s millennial remark altogether as simply for a moment “an old man screams at the cloud”; maybe there is some truth to the fact that younger generations don’t buy what he sells. Some critics and social media commentators have criticized the portrayal of rape in the film and questioned Scott’s prerogative to tell such a story (it should be noted that the film was written by Damon, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener) . I would say this is a specific type of bad faith movie reading that’s especially prevalent among millennials online. In this case, it is the one that does not properly recognize Holofcener’s contribution and diminishes the progressive sensitivity of Scott’s own work, which includes Alien and Thelma & Louise.

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Yesterday saw the release of another Scott film: the House of Gucci maximalist fashion biopic. Whether he knows it or not, this is a film it’s written ‘millennial’ about, from the casting of Lady Gaga to the real crime premise to how its simple trailer was immediately broken down and regurgitated. in Twitter memes. Maybe Scott has put his finger on Millennials’ pulse more than he hints at. But when you make a movie as good and substantial as The Last Duel, and hardly anyone goes to see it, you have every right to be bored. This is the truth according to Ridley Scott.

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