'Better Man' Climbs Its Way To The Paramount+ Stage

I watch every chimp I see from Chimp Anne A. to Chimp Robbie

Imagine bombing so hard that the major trades don’t even pick up your streaming arrival announcement. Paramount+ announced that Better Man, the biopic that literally made a monkey out of its subject musician Robbie Williams, would be arriving on the service on Tuesday, March 11 in the United States and Canada. At least the advance notice was as good as the studio’s better performers, as it came Monday, basically a day before. As always, international rollout will be announced later on.

The streamer’s announcement as posted to its socials goes as such: “A musical spectacle unlike anything you've ever seen. #BetterManMovie takes the stage on #ParamountPlus TOMORROW” Opening on a limited release on December 25, it expanded wider on January 10. Going by the limited release date, it would have taken 76 days to reach Paramount+, making it quite an outlier in Paramount’s 2024 slate. However, it’s only 60 days from January 10, falling in line quite well, as previously covered. This is quite the inverse of Sony Pictures’s measure of its 2024 slate’s theatrical windows before hitting Netflix. Using Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night as my sole example because it’s they one I know best and offhand, it opened wide on October 11, and arrived there (in the United States of course) on January 25, which was a 106-day window. However, it originally opened on a limited release 2 weeks earlier on September 27, bringing it to the more common 120-day window its films had.

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Better Man is directed by The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey, and narrated by Williams, who provides his own singing vocals while portrayed as an anthropomorphic CGI chimpanzee, played by Jonno Davies using motion capture. It is described as the “ultimate antidote to the sanitized biopic genre”, but also a “powerful and soul-stirring”, “moving and poignant story about fame, recovery, relationships and redemption”. It’s also said to remain honest and raw to its subject matter.

The press release boasts Better Man’s Best Visual Effects Oscar nomination, high critical reception, but strangest of all the musicals and biopics similar to it that Paramount+ already has available. And that’s largely because it’s filler because it doesn’t have much else to boast. It truly bombed at the box office. The film’s most significant box office tracking didn’t even make it out of February, by which point the film had only grossed $2 million in the United States and Canada, and $18.3 million in other territories, amounting to only $20.3 million in global earnings. The failure in the States is attributed to his obscurity, that he isn’t that known here. But that’s on top of the film having only earned $6.1 million in the United Kindom and $2.5 million in Australia through three weeks (December 26 to January 15). And that plus the American total through nine weeks already pushes 50% of the global total. However, one media analyst says Paramount wanted to turn it into a sleeper hit, and so is anticipating its Paramount+ arrival to play a part in that with good word of mouth, even surrounding the odd premise. The film also stars Steve Pemberton, Kate Mulvany, and Alison Steadman.

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Source: Press release