It’s hard to believe “Live By Night” could’ve gone wrong. Ben Affleck has proven he could make top-shelf blockbuster entertainment with “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Town,” and “Argo,” and getting together a cast including Elle Fanning, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Messina, Zoe Saldana and Chris Cooper to adapt a book by Dennis Lehane seemed like it couldn’t lose. And yet, the resulting film was beautifully vacant, showing off a lot of effort of costume design and weirdly fake-looking backgrounds, but little in dramatic heft. Critics were unkind, audiences could’ve cared less, and now Warner Bros. is gonna pay.
READ MORE: Gangster Squad Drama ‘Live By Night’ Is A Major Misfire For Director Ben Affleck [Review]
Variety reveals that the studio is getting to ready to eat a $75 million loss on the movie. Budgeted at $65 million (before marketing), the film has done a miserable $10 million domestic (about the same as “Extract,” the Mike Judge movie featuring Affleck that you forgot about), part of a deathly total $16 million worldwide take. The movie isn’t expected to make any kind of further splash overseas, and since it wasn’t in any awards conversations either, WB is hoping they can make some money back from broadcasting deals and home video, but at the end of day, it’s going to be a big red mark on their ledger.
A bummer for Affleck, but no matter what he does, “The Batman” will be a hit, so he’ll be back on top soon enough. Moreover, WB is pretty much Affleck’s directorial home for the foreseeable future (just like how the studio keeps Clint Eastwood and Christopher Nolan on the lot), so don’t consider this a “Gigli“-style career changer, just more of a very unfortunate bump in the road.