The big-budget environmental disaster movie from Warner Bros. got “washed out” in its domestic debut over the weekend, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Raking in a paltry $13.3 million against a $120 million production budget, Geostorm is a disappointment for multiple reasons — including the timing of its release.
“The fact that Geostorm looked like a mashup of every single disaster movie ever created is probably the culprit here,” box-office analyst Jeff Bock, of Exhibitor Relations, told THR. “And it certainly didn’t help that our country recently faced a double whammy of storms that tore through Texas, Puerto Rico and Florida.”
Indeed, THR reports that in light of the hurricanes, Warner Bros. sent out an urgent message to theaters across America in early September asking they remove “brave the storm” Geostorm posters featuring a massive tsunami wave. They were replaced with a “control the weather, control the world” tagline instead. Even still, the movie underperformed in the Southeast, the South and Texas when it was released.
The one positive for studios is that the movie, which follows Butler as a satellite engineer who is sent back to space to stop climate-controlling satellites from creating a man-made catastrophic storm, has performed better abroad. It’s earned $49.6 million overseas and is still awaiting an open in China, France and Italy.
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