Box Office Poison: 6 Reasons Amy Schumer’s ‘I Feel Pretty’ Flopped
Source: https://goo.gl/J1HTg1
From a respectable $30 million opening for Trainwreck, to a disappointing $19.5 million opening for Snatched (which ultimately flopped), to a humiliating $16 million opening for I Feel Pretty… Amy Schumer’s movie career is now in serious trouble. If you include Thank You for Your Service (which grossed just $9.5 million), Schumer has now starred in three flops in a row.
Like Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Schumer has almost certainly destroyed a promising movie career — quickly devolved from movie star to box office poison.
What makes this latest opening especially catastrophic for Schumer is that, unlike the R-rated Trainwreck and Snatched, I Feel Pretty is PG-13, and therefore accessible to a much wider audience. Nevertheless, even with its relatively low budget and PG-13 rating, Deadline reports I Feel Pretty will still lose money.
How did this happen? Let me count the ways…
No Sex Appeal
In the Woke Era, we are not supposed to say these things out loud, but no matter how much the Social Justice Warriors attempt to gaslight us into believing otherwise, human nature is still human nature, and who wants to spend $12 and two hours watching a chubby woman act like a hot chick?
There is certainly room in comedy for a Lou Costello, Oliver Hardy, John Candy, and Melissa McCarthy (who is looking pretty great these days). But the chubby comedian is its own genre, one filled with pratfalls, sweetness, humiliation, pathos, and ultimately triumph over the snobs.
Schumer is not a chubby comedienne. She looked fantastic in Trainwreck. Instead, then, she is a rich celebrity who has let herself go, who doesn’t care about her looks, and who demands we accept her sloth and self-loathing as an act of empowerment. This, of course, is absurd. No one goes to the movies to look at themselves.
Had Schumer been in Trainwreck-shape and used CGI or a fat suit for the jokes (See: Hal, Shallow), I Feel Pretty would have been more appealing because Schumer would have been more appealing.
I am sorry, but that is just true. In fact, it is biology.
Let me add that this is not just about weight. Quite stupidly, all of the sex appeal was stripped from another 2018 flop, the Warner Brothers remake of Tomb Raider.
The character of Lara Croft is iconic, primarily for her otherworld beauty, her womanly sexiness, her hot cha cha. And probably because they are too provincial to understand that there are not enough woke people in the world to turn a movie into a hit, the filmmakers stupidly stripped Lara Croft of the very thing that made her an icon — her sex appeal.
Worse still, they cast Alicia Vikander, who is herself breathtaking, and still used a fascist boot to stomp dead the character’s va-va-voom.
Nearly 17 years ago, Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft grossed $130 million domestic, compared to the remake’s $56 million, and I will guarantee you that was because Jolie padded her bra and captured our sexual imaginations, stirred something primal in us — while Vikander acted like a guy.
Jolie wanted to be objectified and we were happy to objectify her. That was her choice and ours, a fair trade in a free country.
Removing sex appeal from movies is going to come with a heavy cost.
Amy Schumer is a Jerk
After her massive hit with Trainwreck, Schumer squandered all of that goodwill by becoming a stuffy asshole, a scold, another left-wing Hollywood narcissist; a divisive, preachy, bitter, pompous, self-righteous insufferable who is going to tell us what to think, what to believe, how to speak, and who to vote for.
She lost half of her potential audience right there, maybe more.
I Feel Pretty had nothing to offer moviegoers other than Schumer. It is not an event movie or a CGI’d thrill-ride; it is an Amy Schumer movie and Mrs. Schumer is working overtime to alienate the customers.