Mike Flanagan’s ‘The Life of Chuck’ Sees Poor Box Office Performance Amongst Positive Critical Reviews

Mike Flanagan’s third and latest Stephen King film adaptation, The Life of Chuck, is struggling at the box office despite high critical ratings. Flanagan is well-known for his emotionally driven horror projects, like Netflix’s Haunting of Hill House, Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass. The filmmaker seemingly jumped genre realms with his new feature, which is more of science-fiction drama. While that change evidently worked critically, including with a high rating on Rotten Tomatoes, The Life of Chuck has had to strive to prosper in the box office. The feature even expanded to a wide theatrical release this past weekend, but it seems to not have made much of a difference. 

According to Deadline, the film has grossed a total of $2.4 million in the domestic box office after a week of limited release and three days of releasing nationwide. This performance has The Life of Chuck behind Final Destination Bloodlines’ fifth weekend, even with it being the widest of the features’ openings yet. This made The Life of Chuck the ninth-highest-grossing feature in the box office this weekend. While the budget for this film has not been disclosed, it can be inferred that NEON was definitely not expecting this outcome when purchasing The Life of Chuck after its TIFF release last year. 

One could say that this purchase could be one of the causes of this box’s performance. Rather than NEON releasing the same year of the purchase, the studio waited until the next calendar year to release the feature. NEON also seemingly did not know how to promote Flanagan, a known horror creator, in a non-horror light, making for a lack of promotional content in general. Hopefully, The Life of Chuck will get a second wind on a certain streaming platform. Flanagan seems to have some luck with Netflix, as his other King adaptation, Doctor Sleep, shone over on the site. 

Flanagan’s next project will be another King adaptation, Carrie, which will be a series on Amazon Prime Video.