Less than a year after Disney found music biopic success with Searchlight’s Bob Dylan-focused “A Complete Unknown,” it’s looking like the studio’s encore performance with 20th Century Studios’ “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” won’t attract anywhere near as big an audience.
After premiering at Telluride in August to somewhat positive critical reception, the introspective film directed by Scott Cooper and starring Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen has opened to just $8.6 million this past weekend. Last December, “A Complete Unknown” opened on Christmas Day and earned a $23.2 million 5-day start, legging out to $75 million in the U.S. and Canada.
While there’s the possibility that “Deliver Me From Nowhere” could linger on the box office charts in the weeks ahead thanks to older moviegoers who are Springsteen fans and/or uninterested in November offerings like the action films “Predator: Badlands” and “The Running Man” or the musical “Wicked: For Good,” the word-of-mouth for the film can be best described as generally positive rather than enthusiastically positive like “A Complete Unknown.”
On CinemaScore, “Springsteen” earned a B+, compared to an A for “Complete Unknown. Over on Rotten Tomatoes, “Complete Unknown” has scores of 82% critics and 95% audience compared to 61% critics and 85% audience for “Springsteen.” Still positive, but not on the level that suggests that the film will gain a significant audience beyond Springsteen’s most devoted fans.
It’s not a tentpole-level dud — the New Jersey production has a reported budget of $55 million before marketing — but “Springsteen” is a continuation of a rocky October for Disney as the $180 million “Tron: Ares” has grossed just $123 million after three weekends worldwide. The holidays can’t come fast enough for Disney, as the one-two punch of “Zootopia 2” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash” could have a combined gross of more than $3 billion worldwide.
Glory days…they’ll pass you by
The demographic breakdown for “Deliver Me From Nowhere” tells the story of why it couldn’t crack $10 million. While younger, more diverse audiences flocked to Crunchyroll’s “Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc” anime film or Universal/Blumhouse’s “Black Phone 2,” this biopic skewed older and white. The film’s audience skewed older, with 59% over the age 45 and 85% white. Of that figure, 40% were over 55, signaling a majority of the audience was outside the 18-35 demo that is key to box office success.
To some degree, that’s to be expected given the film’s subject. Certainly a film about a 70s/80s rock legend from New Jersey isn’t going to have the same demo breakdown as “Bob Marley: One Love,” which had a 37% White, 31% Black and 25% Latino opening weekend crowd.
But it does indicate that “Deliver Me From Nowhere” is largely selling tickets to the most hardcore of The Boss’ fans and far less to audiences who might not know his work beyond “Born to Run” and “Born in the U.S.A,” and grabbing those casual fans is what allowed “One Love” and “Complete Unknown” to enjoy box office success.
An experiment that didn’t work
As “Deliver Me From Nowhere” shows in its two-hour runtime, “Nebraska,” the sixth album from the singer-songwriter, was a bold creative risk for Springsteen. Still on the rise in his career and having written the songs for “Born in the U.S.A.” that would make him a global superstar, Springsteen put those off to release an introspective, raw acoustic album that was released, to quote the film, with “No singles, no tours, no press,” and without his face on the cover.
To capture the making of that major left turn from commercial success, Cooper’s film takes a similar deviation from the music biopic formula, taking an approach that led TheWrap’s Steve Pond to describe “Deliver Me From Nowhere” as an “anti-‘Bohemian Rhapsody’“, the antithesis of the Oscar-winning Freddie Mercury biopic that grossed a genre record $903 million in 2018.
After a rollicking performance of “Born to Run” in the film’s opening, the few lively musical performances in “Nowhere” are the studio recording of “Born in the U.S.A.” and a couple of small performances at his hometown venue, the Stone Pony.
Outside of that, the film plunges into the depression and childhood trauma Springsteen grappled with as he wrote and recorded “Nebraska” in the bedroom of his Asbury Park, N.J., home, with flashbacks to a childhood with his alcoholic and sometimes abusive father.
“Maybe a more commercial Springsteen film would have had more of a focus on ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ with more stylistic numbers like ‘Rocketman,’ but that’s not the film Cooper’s going for,” said Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “This is a character-driven film about mental health, and sometimes that’s just not going to be something most moviegoers are interested in.”
The frontman
Given that focus on mental health, it makes sense why White was cast to play Springsteen. But if this weekend is any indication, his breakout success with “The Bear” isn’t leading to substantial interest in seeing him on the big screen, at least in this capacity.
Through four seasons of performances as Carmy Berzatto in “The Bear,” as well as a supporting performance as the late wrestler Kerry Von Erich in “The Iron Claw,” White has become known for his gripping performances as trauma and depression-stricken characters. Several scenes in “Deliver Me From Nowhere” where Springsteen sits alone in his home and wanders the Jersey Shore will remind fans of “The Bear” of similar scenes where White stares out deep in thought at the cloudy Chicago skyline.
Unfortunately, despite White going on an extended press tour with Springsteen himself to promote the film, his rising stardom doesn’t seem to have drawn a critical mass of younger “The Bear” fans to see “Deliver Me From Nowhere” the way Timothee Chalamet attracted a younger cohort to see him play the enigmatic Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown” last winter.
That’s a particular problem for “Nowhere” because while it might find a foothold with older moviegoers, younger crowds will likely skip theaters considerably next weekend with Halloween falling on a Friday. After that, the November offerings on tap will be major competition for the under-45 demographic — especially male moviegoers expected to turn out to see “Predator: Badlands” and “The Running Man.”
Because of that November competition, the most optimistic final domestic total for “Deliver Me From Nowhere” is somewhere in the $35-40 million range, half of what “A Complete Unknown” earned. The film might get some more attention on Hulu, digital rental, or perhaps even a renewed theatrical push in January should White and co-star Jeremy Strong get Oscar nominations for their performances.
But the biopics that have worked in theaters have drawn a younger and more varied audience than what this film got, and if the second weekend drop isn’t lessened by steady turnout from seniors, this theatrical run may pass by in the wink of a young girl’s eye.
