‘Man Down’: the Gary Oldman movie only one person paid to see in the cinema
Thanks to his recurring roles as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise and James Gordon in the Dark Knight trilogy, Gary Oldman has played integral supporting roles in three movies that crossed the fabled billion-dollar mark at the box office.
The next highest-grossing release of his career saw him pop up for an unrecognisable cameo in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer as President Harry Truman. It’s the only one of his seven biggest hits that doesn’t involve wizards or superheroes, but he’s been in plenty more profitable films beyond that.
His villainous turn in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and a voice role in Kung Fu Panda 2 sailed past half a billion dollars in ticket sales, while a diverse array of titles, including Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, the misjudged RoboCop remake, Harrison Ford’s Air Force One, Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula all earned hundreds of millions.
The point is, Oldman has had a very successful career in terms of the cold, hard cash his filmography has generated, but is he the kind of guy who can guarantee butts on seats based on his name alone? If director Dito Montiel’s Man Down is any indication, he is not. Sure, he’s an Academy Award-winning favourite and one of his generation’s very best, but the Oldman fandom isn’t so strong that it can sway the public to take a trip to their local cinema to catch his latest work.
Never was that more obvious – or embarrassing – than when Man Down premiered in the United Kingdom. Admittedly, Oldman is only the third-billed name in the cast behind Shia LaBeouf and Kate Mara, with the war drama following LaBeouf’s Gabriel Drummer as he returns home from active combat on the front lines of Afghanistan to search for his wife and child.
For context, it only played on one screen at Burnley’s Reel Cinema, but still. If there’s anything more soul-crushing for a filmmaker than having absolutely nobody turn up to see their latest work, then the entire audience consisting of a single person runs it a close second. A token theatrical release it may have been, but it ended up being the only memorable thing about Man Down.
Largely panned by critics and evidently shunned by audiences based on its laughable take at the box office, the opening weekend of Man Down yielded the princely sum of £7. That’s cheaper than the average ticket was in April 2017 when the film eventually made its way to the big screen over a year and a half after its world premiere at the 2015 edition of the Venice Film Festival, which raises the question of whether it would have been better to release it in a pricier city like London to add a few more pennies onto that measly haul.
