The Box Office Failure of BABYLON Broke Paramount Pictures CEO's Soul
Director Damien Chazelle’s Babylon was a very interesting and great movie, but it did not do well at the box office. In fact, the film’s failure was a devastating blow to Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins.
During an interview with Variety, Robbins said: “It broke my soul to have Babylon not do well. There’s people who loved the movie, and there’s people who hated the movie, but you can’t deny it’s an ambitious fucking movie.”
It was super ambitious and the story was absolutely fascinating. I have an obsession with Hollywood history, so it was awesome to see another movie like this made that is set in the very early years of Hollywood and how insanely bonkers it was.
The movie was made on a budget of around $80 million, but the film only took in $63 million, which obviously isn’t good. While the history of Hollywood is interesting to some people, the majority of moviegoers just didn’t find it interesting, regardless of the all-star cast.
The film stars Brad Pitt as Jack Conrad, Margot Robbie as Nellie LaRoy, Diego Calva as Manny Torres, Jean Smart as Elinor St. John, Jovan Adepo as Sidney Palmer, and Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu. The movie also stars Lukas Haas as George Munn and Tobey Maguire as James McKay.
Babylon is described as an epic tale “of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.” It’s described as The Great Gatsby, but on steroids, and that’s exactly what it was.
