Jake Kasdan’s festive punch-up is the latest Christmas film to arrive in cinemas – but could it be one of the last?
Ahead of its release in the UK this week, Amazon MGM’s Red One has a few mountains to climb.
Originally scheduled for a Christmas 2023 release, the $250m film was pushed back by a year, reportedly due to the Hollywood strikes. Then, in April, an incendiary The Wrap article alleged star Dwayne Johnson cost the studio $50m by arriving on set seven-to-eight hours late – charges the film’s director and producer have both strenuously denied. A trailer debut in June prompted the Guardian headline: “Will The Rock’s Red One be the worst Christmas movie ever?”. The film’s review embargo lifted at 5am the day of its UK release, coincidentally ensuring any questionable publicity was buried under the rather more pressing news circulating the morning of the 6th November. None of it screamed confidence.
Which is odd, because the film itself is perfectly acceptable. In fact, plenty of it is downright fun. As far as family action-adventure blockbusters go, recent years have offered us much, much worse.
But still, Red One seems unlikely to make much of a dent on the box office, stateside or other side. For Jake Kasdan’s latest to tip into profit theatrically, it will likely need to become the highest-grossing Christmas movie of all time – beating out Illumination’s The Grinch and its $540m taking. Based on current projections (and the far-less quantifiable metric of “which film looks more like Minions: The Rise Of Gru”) that doesn’t seem likely. And here in the UK, it faces an uphill battle for screen space, arriving in cinemas just two days before Paddington In Peru gobbles up family audiences like a sandwich-starved bear.
Thankfully for Amazon MGM, distributing in the US, that doesn’t really matter. Abandoning its Prime Video exclusive plans for a theatrical rollout following some strong test screenings, Deadline reckons the studio only needs to recoup its domestic press and advertising spend to turn a profit.
That also goes some way to explaining why Red One looks quite so streamer-y – not helped by a cast, title and price point with striking resemblances to Netflix’s Red Notice and The Gray Man (both cost around $200m).
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The fact a Christmas film is heading to the cinema at all, when the last few years have been dominated by cheap, Hallmark-adjacent streaming options, comes as something of a surprise. Red One is the only new festive flick getting a wide release in the UK this year. Its biggest competitors, both heading to more than 100 screens, are the 4K restoration of The Polar Express and the stage recording of CBeebies’ 2024 pantomime, Beauty And The Beast. That Christmas (Richard Curtis’ charming, animated return to the festive canon) is screening in fewer than 25 locations before heading to Netflix on 6th December.
That Amazon MGM was willing to splash upwards of $200m on a straight-to-streaming Christmas flick gives some indication of where these films are seen to belong by the studio system. A theatrical rollout with less than no chance of turning a profit on its own makes Red One’s cinema release feel like a nice-to-have addition to the riches the studio is making from Prime Video.
Whether or not Red One flops on the big screen, its road there only really confirms one thing: the home for Christmas movies, now, is on streaming. Not even $250m can change that.
