Staff Writer
Bill Condon’s Wikileaks film The Fifth Estate was this years biggest box office flop. In an interview with EW the films director deemed the films unfortunate reception to its focus; Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder.
As of Oct. 31, the film earned just $3.1 million in North America. The film fell behind major films Prisoners, Enough Said and Despicable Me 2. In the interview, Coden gave reason for why he thinks the film failed to compete with such films and why it failed to place high in the box office
Coden said that while everyone was excited for the film because of its popularity in the news, it simply wore out its welcome. He also said there is something about the films topic that threw off views. “I do think there’s something about [Assange] that does not suggest an evening’s entertainment,” he said.
The reviews suggested that Coden wasn’t too off base. Rotten Tomatoes gave the film 37 per cent, placing it lower than the remake Carrie and the Sylvester Stallone-Arnold Schwarzenegger thriller Escape Plan.
Conversely, Assange himself was not shocked by the films reception. In an interview with The Hollywood Foreign Press Association just a week before the films release, Assange said “The Fifth Estate [was] destined to be a box-office failure, [because audiences prefer] combative underdogs,” reported HuffingtonPost.
The WikiLeaks founder also reportedly told actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Assange in the film, that he should drop the project all together. He wrote to Cumberbatch, “I believe that you should reconsider your involvement in this enterprise. By meeting with you, I would validate this wretched film, and endorse the talented, but debauched, performance that the script will force you to give.”
The film written by Josh Singer was based on the two books, Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website and WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy written by Luke Harding and David Leigh.
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