She Said is a 2022 film by director Maria Schrader that tells the story of New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor (Carey Mulligan) and Megan Twohey (Zoe Kazan) and their investigation that exposed Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual abuse and misconduct of women. The real-life story sent a ripple effect through Hollywood and helped popularize the #MeToo movement, which was a social movement against sexual abuse and misconduct. Between a high-profile story that audiences remember and a talented creative team, She Said seemed to have everything needed for both a potential awards contender and a mainstream hit.
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Yet sadly that was not the case. She Said opened in sixth place at the box office with just $2.2 million (off a $32 million budget) coming in below the initial estimates. While a poor opening for a film could have been excused in 2021 due to theaters reopening and audiences still being unsure to return following the COVID-19 pandemic, the release of blockbusters like Top Gun: Maverick and Spider-Man: No Way Home along with the solid performances of mid-budget films like Smile and Ticket to Paradise shows that audiences are turning out for movies, just not She Said. Why didn’t audiences turn out for She Said? Is it that the #MeToo Movement isn’t as splashy a headline anymore, or is the film more the victim of an ever-changing media landscape?
No Evidence to Say Audiences Are Tired of #MeToo
Universal Pictures
Getting it right out of the way, it would be incredibly dismissive to say that audiences are tired of the #MeToo movement or social justice causes (something which is hardly a priority to the cause, anyway), or that this had any impact on the box office. While some have tried to say social justice movements have a negative impact on the box office, the truth is the numbers don’t support that. Movies flop for a number of reasons. For many, it may just be easier to blame the subject and not try to learn actually lessons from the box office.
The #MeToo Movement is still a movement that is going strong and is a very important one. Social issues are an important part of many movies, even if an audience doesn’t quite pick up on them at first. Audiences who saw She Said seemed to like it, as the CinemaScore for the film was an A and reviews were pretty positive about it, averaging a rating of 7.5 out of 10 on Rotten Tomatoes. In all actuality, She Said bombed at the box office more because of the landscape in which it was released.
A Combination of Too Soon and Too Late
In 2017, the #MeToo movement went mainstream with the exposés in The New York Times and the report by Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker a few days later. It was a massive movement that sparked a great deal of change in multiple industries, and there is still plenty of work to be done. It has the strange phenomenon of both feeling so recent (only five years ago) but also something in the public mind that happened long ago, when compared to the ridiculous amount of weird and terrible news over the past five years, and many think it’s over.
She Said was released in theaters five years after the scandal broke, which is both recent enough for audiences to remember it but also a little too early for audiences to want to revisit it. Similarly, World Trade Center was released in 2006, just five years after September 11th. That movie opened at number three at the box office behind the second weekend of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and the new release Step Up. That didn’t mean audiences were tired of September 11th or that the event didn’t mean anything to them, it just wasn’t a movie audiences wanted to rush out for, and the same can be said for She Said. Had they made a movie so soon, it would have been exploitative (see the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard biopic Hot Take, for example), yet releasing it any later can run the risk of feeling like old news to audiences.
A Not-So-Ideal Release
Universal Pictures released She Said, and they clearly were hoping for the movie to be an awards’ contender, hence giving it a November release date within a period when many Oscar contenders open. However, unlike their other big awards film The Fabelmans, which was given a platform release on a few small screens gradually to build buzz in subsequent weeks, Universal Pictures opted to give She Said a wide release instead of allowing word to build up. A platform release worked for Spotlight, a similar movie to She Said which dealt with journalists exposing a sexual abuse scandal, where it played in limited release for two weeks before opening wide and even then only opened to number eight at the box office with $3 million.
She Said opened on November 18, 2022, where it not only had to compete with other new releases like The Menu and Bones and All, but was coming out the second week of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which everyone knew was going to dominate the box office. Combine that with being released the week before Thanksgiving, where it would compete with the animated family film Strange World, the old school war movie Devotion, and the limited release of the highly anticipated sequel Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and She Said would be lost in the crowd. A movie about the diligent work of journalists to expose the serious sexual assaults by Harvey Weinstein might be a captivating story, but not an ideal film out with the family during the holidays.
She Said is the Type of Movie Audiences Stream
There is a good chance that had She Said premiered on a streaming platform, either as a film or a limited series, it would have been a huge hit. Ripped from the headline stories have been thriving on television and streaming platforms for years; one need only look at the massive success of Netflix series like Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Inventing Anna, or The Girl from Plainview.
However, audiences have since been conditioned to view these types of stories as something that can be viewed on the small screen. The big screen has now been associated with blockbuster event films, whereas more adult-skewing dramas tend to be given the treatment of waiting for it to be on a streaming platform (think Power of the Dog, The Irishman, Roma, and countless more). In the 1990s, mid-budget adult-orientated dramas like She Said could turn a decent profit and play alongside blockbuster movies. Now though, with tickets so high and everybody having access to multiple streaming platforms, it is easier to justify waiting.
It was not the subject matter that kept audiences away from She Said, but more the reality of how people choose to watch certain types of films. Universal Pictures’ deal with theaters now allows them to send a movie that opens below a certain amount to PVOD after two weeks in theaters. There is a chance that She Said will become a big hit with digital rentals, yet it is a grim fate for theaters and cinephiles if only blockbusters are seen as worthy of a big-screen viewing.
