The reboot of Charlie’s Angels may not have set the US box office alight – quite the contrary – but director Elizabeth Banks is still proud of what she’s achieved.
The new take on the female crime-fighting agency finds new Angels Kristen Stewart, Aladdin star Naomi Scott and Ella Balinska joining Banks’s Bosley.
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However, on being unleashed in the US over the weekend, it made just $8.6 million, a pretty disastrous start to proceedings.
Tweeting about the box office state of affairs, Banks said:
Well, if you’re going to have a flop, make sure your name is on it at least 4x. I’m proud of #CharliesAngels and happy it’s in the world.
— Elizabeth Banks (@ElizabethBanks) November 18, 2019
All that said, it’s not necessarily all over just yet for the movie – it made a slightly more respectable $19.3 million abroad, bringing its total to $27.6 million, though with production costs in the $50 million range, it’s got a very steep hill to climb.
In an interview prior to the weekend’s disappointing haul, Banks stressed that the ‘movie has to make money’.
“If this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies,” she told Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper.
Charlie’s Angels (Credit: Columbia Pictures)
However, when it wa pointed out that female-fronted action movies like Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman had been box office smashes ($1.1 billion and $821 million worldwide), Banks said that those examples don’t tell the whole story.
“They’ll go and see a comic book movie with Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel because that’s a male genre,” she said.
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“So even though those are movies about women, they put them in the context of feeding the larger comic book world, so it’s all about, yes, you’re watching a Wonder Woman movie but we’re setting up three other characters or we’re setting up Justice League.
“By the way, I’m happy for those characters to have box office success, but we need more women’s voices supported with money because that’s the power. The power is in the money.”
Also starring Sam Claflin, Djimon Hounsou and Patrick Stewart, Charlie’s Angels is out now across the UK.
