Paul and Saoirse’s box office FOE pas
Sci-f i romance fails to pull numbers despite star cast
THEY are two of Ireland’s biggest global box office draws, but Oscar nominees Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal’s latest release is not proving to be a hit with cinema fans here, new figures reveal.
Despite only opening three weeks ago, sci-fi drama Foe is already out of many theatres and is currently ranked 128th at the Irish box office for 2023.
While Foe was made on a low budget and received relatively little promotion, it was thought Ireland’s hottest young actors sharing a screen for the first time would bring in the crowds – on these shores at least.
But according to Comscore Movies, the film took just €53,782 on the island of Ireland in its first three weeks, placing it at number 128 in Irish cinema releases this year. The amount is €1,000 less than Big George Foreman, a documentary about the former heavyweight boxer, took earlier this year in its opening weekend alone.
Foe, directed by Australian Garth Davis, only lasted a couple of weeks in some Irish cinema chains, including IMC and Odeon, but is still showing elsewhere.
A sci-fi about an unhappily married couple whose lives get weirder when Mescal’s character must go into space leaving Ronan’s character behind to love a perfect AI replica of her husband. The film has received mixed reviews.
It currently has an aggregate score of 44 out of 100 on review aggregator Metacritic, across 33 professional critic appraisals.
The performances of the two IFTA-winning leads has been praised, though some reviewers have suggested the film has too many similarities with other recent sci-fi works – not least an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Netflix series Black Mirror from earlier this year.
In Beyond The Sea, Aaron Paul and Josh Hartnett played astronauts whose AI doubles remained at home with their families. But Foe is in fact based on a 2018 novel of the same name by Iain Reid.
A manager at an IMC Cinema branch said the film’s short run in theatres ‘wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for an indie film’. He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘The advertising budget wouldn’t be as much, so they wouldn’t have as long a cinema stay as something with a bigger budget.
‘One thing we do find is if a movie doesn’t get great promotion, regardless of who’s in it, it can kind of just go through the cracks now and again. It can be quite surprising.’
The manager added the film’s ‘subject matter is a little bit niche’, which may have turned off some non-sci-fi fans who have admired the previous work of Ronan, 29, and Mescal, 27.
Another industry source told the MoS that Amazon Studios – who purchased the film in 2021 for more than $30m (€28.1m) – could be keeping their powder dry for the film’s forthcoming release on their Amazon Prime platform, and would hope people interested in the film are waiting for that too.
Ronan said earlier this year that she and Mescal had become ‘good friends’ making Foe in Australia.
‘We knew each other sort of in passing before, just through friends,’ she said. ‘We’ve become very, very close since making the film. We’re genuine friends; we’re not Hollywood friends.’
‘We’ve become very close since making it’