Kevin Spacey used to be a pretty big draw for movies and TV. It’s not a mystery why, the guy is incredibly talented and has given some of the best performances in the history of cinema. The Usual Suspects is his masterclass, but the guy is a real star of stage and screen.
It turns out that being accused of trying to rape a bunch of 13-year-olds hurts the bottom line no matter how talented you are, though, as Entertainment Weekly reported his new film Billionare Boys Club opened to just $126 on ten screens. That is barely more than Zyzzyx Road, a Katherine Heigl film which played in one theater with a week of noon screenings as a formality based on SAG rules which is the lowest grossing film in history at $30.
It’s probably not great that the film, which might be the last Kevin Spacey film ever released, had “boys” in the title.
This might be a test case for people trying to make a comeback in the face of sexual misconduct allegations in the #MeToo era. Or it might just be that despite his talent, Kevin Spacey isn’t quite good enough for people to look past his conduct. Bill Cosby had no trouble finding people to come to his comedy show before his sexual assault retrial and while Talking Dead’s return after the allegations against Chris Hardwick were the series’ lowest ever, ratings are always low for Fear the Walking Dead-focused episodes and ratings were only down a few hundredths of a point from where they are normally.
The one takeaway from this is that Ridley Scott absolutely made the right call by replacing Spacey with Christopher Plummer in All the Money in the World. That was genius.