‘Juror No. 2’ Could Be Clint Eastwood’s Last Film — So Why Is Warner Bros. Burying It?
AFI Fest, the longest-running film festival in Los Angeles, will cap off its 38th edition Sunday evening with the world premiere of Clint Eastwood’s “Juror #2” at the historic TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Stars Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette and Zoey Deutch will walk the red carpet, which marks the festival’s fourth world premiere of an Eastwood-directed feature. The courtroom drama is the filmmaker’s 40th directorial effort — and, given he’s 94 years old, it’s potentially his final one.
Four days later, Warner Bros. will give “Juror #2” a somewhat less distinguished treatment. The studio is putting out the feature in a limited release of less than 50 theaters, according to two sources with knowledge of the film’s distribution, with no current plans to expand to more locations in the following weeks.
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While exact location counts are still being finalized, as it stands one week from opening day, “Juror #2” is currently listing showtimes at four locations around New York City, five in the Los Angeles area and one in Chicago. Across the country’s 25 most populous cities, the film is listing pre-sales in fewer than 25 locations. Cineplex, Canada’s leading exhibitor chain, is opening the film in just one theater in Toronto and 160 nationwide venues. While many indies never expand beyond a handful of theaters, it’s less common for releases from major Hollywood studios like Warner Bros. As things currently stand, “Juror #2” will appear in far fewer auditoriums than other awards season releases like “Anora” and “The Brutalist,” which were made on leaner budgets, but will eventually unspool across thousands of screens.
“‘Juror #2’ is releasing in the U.S., U.K., France, Spain, Italy and Germany with the full support of Warner Bros.,” said a spokesperson for the studio. “The film will have its worldwide debut at the AFI Film Festival this weekend.”
Sources tell Variety that Warner Bros. is considering not reporting box office grosses for the film — an atypical practice for a traditional Hollywood studio, though not an unprecedented one. Earlier this year, Disney placed Daisy Ridley’s biographical sports drama “Young Woman and the Sea” in an undisclosed number of theaters and elected against releasing grosses. Two weeks later, the film debuted on Disney+. The decision seemed bizarre to the few who noticed: a half-measure roll-out for a film that was originally commissioned as an exclusive streaming release, but shifted to a theatrical run after testing highly. Some noted that the release meant that “Young Woman and the Sea” had fulfilled the Academy qualifications to be considered for Oscar nominations, but that seems incidental given the film hasn’t received the promotional push required for a serious awards contender.
Similarly, “Juror #2” was originally conceived as a streaming release, as first reported by Puck and confirmed by a studio source. The studio shifted to theatrical after screening the film, which was produced on a budget in the mid-$30 million range. While next week’s limited release will serve as an awards-qualifying run, sources tell Variety that the film is not being perceived as a major Oscar player internally at Warner Bros. Notably, “Juror #2” isn’t featured on the company’s FYC 2024 webpage. It’s not entirely unexpected, given Eastwood hasn’t proven to be an awards player since “American Sniper” landed six Academy Award nominations in 2015. Only two nods have followed since: sound editing for “Sully” in 2017, and Kathy Bates in supporting actress for “Richard Jewell” in 2020.
Yet the hush-hush rollout for “Juror #2” remains a peculiar approach for a filmmaker who still has commercial appeal. “American Sniper” was the highest-grossing domestic release of 2014. Two of Eastwood’s follow-ups, “Sully” and “The Mule,” both earned more than $100 million in North America. But in the contemporary theatrical landscape, badly rattled by the COVID pandemic, original adult-skewing dramas are perceived by studios to be much riskier theatrical prospects than they were even five years ago.
Warner Bros., the studio that Eastwood has partnered with for more than 50 years, seemed to be reevaluating its relationship with the filmmaker following the 2021 release of his most recent feature, “Cry Macho.” That Western drama, which saw a nonagenarian Eastwood directing himself as a former rodeo star finding redemption south of the border, was a box office flop, grossing $16.5 million globally against a production budget of $33 million. The film faced uphill challenges, launching in a theatrical landscape still in its first months of recovery from pandemic lockdowns. It also received a simultaneous streaming debut with a day-and-date launch on Max (then titled HBO Max), as with the rest of Warner Bros.’ theatrical slate that year.
The underperformance of the tepidly-reviewed “Cry Macho” allegedly emerged as a point of contention at the studio, amid shifting strategy in the wake of WarnerMedia’s merger with Discovery, Inc. In May 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that then-newly-minted CEO David Zaslav questioned why “Cry Macho” was made after film leadership conceded that they had doubts the movie could turn a profit. “It’s not show friends, it’s show business,” the exec was quoted.
Nonetheless, Eastwood was back in Warner Bros.’ good graces by April 2023, when the studio greenlit “Juror #2” under the leadership of Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, who were tapped to lead the WB film division in the summer prior. But now, the studio seems to have little confidence in the film’s commercial prospects. One source close to Warner Bros. says that the decision to put “Juror #2” in theaters at all represents a gesture of gratitude toward Eastwood, who has earned the company billions in box office grosses, as well as numerous awards, for films like “Unforgiven” and “Million Dollar Baby.” But does a limited rollout in a handful of venues truly qualify as an appropriate distribution plan for an industry icon who has remained loyal to a studio for decades?
In the current landscape, that’s apparently as good as it gets.
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