Clint Eastwoodās Juror #2 arrives in cinemas this weekend ā but Warner Bros has hardly come out swinging in support of the film. Why?
When the first batch of reviews for Clint Eastwood’s newest movie landed over the weekend, I must confess I feared the worst a little. The film in question, Juror #2, has been the subject of much interest over the past few weeks, with the movie itself almost at the side of the conversation.
Instead, the focus has been how Warner Bros has been dealing with the latest – possibly final ā film from its longest-serving director. The list of hits that Eastwood has delivered for the studio kicked off with the Dirty Harry films. Then, as a director, he’s economically made successes such as Unforgiven, Space Cowboys, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino, American Sniper, Sully, The Mule… it’s quite a list.
Still, Juror #2 is the first Clint Eastwood movie to be released under the already-infamous David Zaslav era at Warner Bros, and, well, it seems even Clint isn’t exempt from The New Broom that Zaslav has swept through the corridors of the company.
The rough summation. Eastwood finished making Juror #2 for a modest $35m, delivering a final cut earlier this year (the movie was shot in 2023, but was delayed by the actors’ strike in Hollywood). Warner Bros has thus known what film it’s had for the past three or four months at least, and – bluntly – whether it’s any good or not. From the outside looking in, it was not giving off signs of confidence.
Depending on which story you believe has credence, at one stage it was looking to send the film straight to its Max streaming service in the US, as it has done recently with the long-delayed Salem’s Lot. Then, it was going for a theatrical release. But! That theatrical release is being limited to just 50 screens across the whole of America.
On top of that, the studio is reportedly not going to report box office returns (Disney did something similar with the really rather good Young Woman And The Sea earlier this year). We’re used to streaming services giving short shrift to box office reporting, but Warner Bros? That’s a bit different.
Just to ice the cake, Warner Bros then released the names of the films it was putting forward for this year’s awards season. The film conspicuously missing? Yep, that’d be Juror #2. Never mind that awards campaigning is effectively storytelling, and the tale of Eastwood making a film well into his 90s might be something people got behind. Warner Bros isn’t even entering the movie into the end of year awards shindig at all. That’ll save a few quid, right?
In isolation, one of these things might be seen as a fumble, or an outlier. Collected together, a basic sniff test suggests Warner Bros doesn’t have confidence in Juror #2.
However: let’s go back to those reviews, now the film has actually been seen. As much as it’s easy for us to judge how a studio should approach the release (or non-release) of its films, we’re not the ones who make the decisions. I did, thus, have a simmering thought at the back of my head: presumably there’s a problem with the film. Maybe, y’know, it’s not very good?
Well, that first collection of reviews from Juror #2’s AFI Film Festival debut over the weekend suggests otherwise. A solid to very good courtroom drama, that most seem to really quite like.
Oscar stuff? Maybe on the very outskirts at best. Box office gold? Again, unlikely. But enough in the tank to justify a wider cinema roll-out, with a healthy lead-in to the home formats release? Well, quite feasibly.
Remove, then, the factor that the quality of the film itself isn’t a problem, and let’s look at why Warner Bros is being as it is with the film.
The obvious answer is commerce. That it doesn’t want to throw money at a proper cinema release, as then it’ll have to back it with marketing, distribution costs and basically lots of the things you’d imagine Warner Bros being partly in business to actually do. Presumably, somebody has run some numbers on a posh computer program and concluded that the chance of a profit off the back of a cinema run is negligible.
What counters this though is that the studio was interested enough to spend $35m on making the film. This year we’ve seen – admittedly genre-driven – two hit movies with marketing campaigns that haven’t gone beyond $10m in expense become box office hits (Longlegs and Terrifier 3). Appreciating that Warner Bros’ marketing effort has been hands-on with Joker: Folie A Deux, it’s the kind of studio that’s demonstrated time and time again its ability to sell movies. This time, though, the studio is planting its resources and chips elsewhere.
Ultimately, maybe the elephant in the room is this: Juror #2 isn’t the kind of film that Warner Bros is interested in anymore. This and Barry Levinson’s Alto Knights – due in 2025, after delays – are end of an era projects, as Warner Bros doubles down on franchises and suchlike for its cinema bets.
After all, if we’re talking generational shifts, even the title of Juror #2 doesn’t sit within the current way movies work. A hashtag halfway through the title of a film? Well, that’s not going to play on social media is it? Try sticking that on Threads, where you’re only allowed one hashtag else Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithm of doom will chuckle in your face for a bit.
The person silent at the heart of all of this is Clint Eastwood himself. Heās rarely given interviews over the last decade or so, anyway, and if you believe reports, he has plans to make another film. Once upon a time it’d be a given that Warner Bros – if nothing else out of sheer appreciation – would back him. Does Zaslav Warner Bros work like that? It doesn’t look like it on this evidence.
What does Clint make of it all? He hasn’t been telling. But it’d be hard to blame him for feeling a little bit slighted, as he surveys the Warner Bros lot that his movies had in part paid for.
Still, for those of us in the UK, there’s more of a glimmer. Juror #2 hasn’t been press screened over here to my knowledge, but itās still getting a 300+ screen cinema release ā far wider than its American roll-out. This, again, reflects the Salem’s Lot situation, where the US release was restricted but its UK outing was far and wide.
Juror #2 arrives in cinemas on the 1st November. It’s just the number of cinemas you can see it on will significantly vary depending on where you are in the world. Turns out it doesn’t necessarily matter if the film is good or not: there’s a reducing role in cinema for a $35m courtroom drama like Juror #2 ā even if it has been made by one of the most critically and commercially successful filmmakers Warner Bros has ever had.
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