Director Ridley Scott has been finger-pointing, and pesky millennials appear to have spoiled his film The Last Duel.
Matt Damon, Jodie Comer and Ben Affleck all star in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel.
Ridley Scott is, it’s worth stating from the off, an extraordinary filmmaker. He’s gifted the world so many terrific films, and his output puts many others to shame. He rightly remains regarded as one of Britain’s finest film directors.
But still: Ridley, come on mate.
He’s just been a guest on the WTF With Marc Maron podcast, in a new episode that’s just gone live (to promote his new film, House Of Gucci). It’s a fascinating listen and the pair go right the way through his career, with plenty of candid stories.
Things do take something of a turn though when it gets to one of his two 2021 releases, The Last Duel. The film cost over $100m to make, and came out in the UK with an 18 certificate. A historical drama, aimed at an adult audience, with some very difficult material within it, it’d be fair to say the film struggled. Its box office returns of $27m worldwide were, to put it mildly, hugely disappointing.
Several reasons were cited as to why. The 150 minute running time for a start. The restrictive rating, that kept younger audiences away. The barely-visible (in the UK anyway) marketing campaign. The fact that the film seemed to be out of most multiplexes within days of opening.
These are some of the suggested reasons for what happened. Ridley Scott has a few more.
Just gone 27 minutes into the aforementioned podcast episode, he argues “Disney did a fantastic promotion job” on the film, but “I think what it boils down to, where we’ve got today, is the audiences were brought up on these fucking cellphones. The milleniuns (sic) do not want to be taught anything unless it’s told on a cellphone”.
“It’s a broad stroke,” he concedes, adding that services such as Facebook have “given the wrong kind of confidence to this generation.” As such, they didn’t go to see the film.
It’s an odd bit of reasoning, and not something that makes a whole lot of sense. By the strict definition of a millennial, the oldest of the cohort are edging into their 40s now. That sounds like a pretty natural target audience for a drama with some fairly brutal material in it. But, who knows? Perhaps everyone’s too busy playing Snake on their Nokias these days?
Scott remains a genuine titan of British cinema, and the full podcast episode is well worth a listen. But with The Last Duel heading to Disney+ in the UK in the next couple of weeks, perhaps we can all watch it on a tiny screen, as Ridley seems to think we want to.
