Michael Bay, the filmmaker behind Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and the Transformers franchise, was once the leading architect of explosive, big-budget blockbusters. Ambulance, the director’s latest exploding action thriller, proves that times and tastes have changed since Mayhem and Autobots ruled the box office.
Over the weekend, Universal’s Ambulance, a heist thriller largely set on an ambulance, faltered at $8.7 million in 3,412 North American theaters. It’s a disappointing debut at the domestic box office given Bay’s track record in the commercial hit field. The R-rated Ambulance is currently considered the worst opening weekend of Bay’s career, trailing 2013’s massive action comedy Pain & Gain ($20 million debut) and Benghazi war film 13 Hours (December 16). million dollars debut) from 2016. None of these films set the world on fire.
You might say, “Hey! We’re still going through a pandemic, and the domestic box office hasn’t returned to normal.” And that’s true. But during the same three-day period that Ambulance fizzled, the family-friendly Sonic the Hedgehog 2 opened at a whopping $71 million. And older male moviegoers, the target audience for Bay’s films, have turned up for The Batman, Spider-Man: No Way Home and James Bond’s latest mission, No Time to Die. Several other films have still managed to sell tickets despite ongoing pandemic effects. As of Sunday, Ambulance grossed just $2 million more than A24’s comedy-fantasy sci-fi mashup Everything Everywhere All at Once ($6 million in 1,250 North American theaters), although the latter has far fewer theaters ran.
Some box office analysts believe the crowded market — Jared Leto’s anti-hero adventure Morbius and Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum’s twisted romantic comedy The Lost City ranked higher on the box office — has worked against Ambulance.
“Timing was the biggest factor working against ‘Ambulance’ this weekend,” said Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at Box Office Pro. “Although ‘Sonic 2’ is a family film, it attracted a strong male audience of all ages due to the cross-generational appeal of the brand. This has significantly impacted the usual wheelhouse of this type of film and Bay’s own target cinema-goers.”
Ambulance cost $40 million, which is relatively cheap for Bay, whose previous films have cost well over $100 million. (The studio spent tens of millions more on marketing and other efforts to get the film on audiences’ radars.) For a major studio release, an $8.7 million debut is disappointing by any measure. But the blow could have been all the more painful if the production budget had been closer to nine figures.
In the late 1990s and early ’20s there was no greater filmmaker than Bay. His films might not be ranked among the top of decade lists by critics (they unlikely made the Criterion Collection), but Bay had a knack for turning adrenaline-pumping, physics-defying tent poles into hits that shaped pop culture define. That formula doesn’t always work these days, especially at a time when Netflix regularly releases a library that plays like a tribute to Bay’s filmography. Audiences no longer need to leave the house to see The Old Guard, Triple Frontier and Bay’s own 6 Underground. And while these movies garnered big stars and (mostly) positive reviews, none of them managed to stay in tune with the times like Bad Boys or Armageddon. Netflix film executive Scott Stuber later admitted to Variety that 6 Underground fell short of expectations.
In a way, the Netflix outfit has come from rom-coms for jaw-dropping action spectacles. With rom-coms, an influx of satisfying, sweet stories trained people to lower their expectations and stay home for any movie that wasn’t stellar. “Ambulance” received a half-heartedly hailed review, earning an average rating of 69% on Rotten Tomatoes. Ticket buyers – 58% of whom were male and 50% aged 35 or older – were more enthusiastic about the film, which secured an “A-” CinemaScore. In “Ambulance,” Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II star as adoptive siblings who hijack an ambulance and hold the vehicle’s occupants hostage.
“Big budget action films were once the bastion of the big screen; only the cinema [could] make these expensive movies profitable,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. “[Those films] are now resonating with audiences on streaming platforms like Netflix who have the cash to produce movies like this.”
At the same time, COVID-19 continues to affect cinema habits. Sure, superhero adventures and video game adaptations can fill theaters, but some genres just don’t resonate with ticket buyers as well as they used to. Former action stars like Harrison Ford, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis, who rode Bay sidecars in Armageddon and recently retired from acting, are no longer the driving force behind the box office successes. As recent box office hits like Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Batman and Sonic the Hedgehog prove, familiar traits are the real draws. Horror is another sure bet at the box office, and Bay has had more success as a producer of late, working on The Purge franchise and John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place films.
“Today’s audiences want something special every time,” said David A. Gross, who runs film consultancy Franchise Entertainment Research. “The bar is now higher.”
For Universal, “Ambulance” extends a bumpy start into 2022. After kicking off the new year with back-to-back duds, the female-fronted heist film The 355, and religious drama Redeeming Love, the studio hired Jennifer Lopez for a romantic Comedy “Marry Me” day-and-date on NBCUniversal’s streamer Peacock, which likely throttled ticket sales at the box office. Bridging revenue from Illumination’s animated comedy Sing 2, which has grossed $162 million since December, has been a bright spot. And a stacked summer table, including Jurassic World Dominion, Minions: The Rise of Gru, and Jordan Peele’s horror film Nope, appears to be reversing that fate.
Just don’t expect Michael Bay-style action epics to come to the rescue. Those days are probably in the rearview mirror.
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