How Morgan Freeman ended up in a movie that only made £46 at the box office: “I’d love to do it”
There are box office bombs, and then there are movies that perform so embarrassingly that the word “bomb” doesn’t even apply anymore. An opening weekend of £46, and that isn’t a typo, obviously falls into the latter category, so why was Morgan Freeman so keen to make it?
If you know anything about how the veteran chooses his roles, then you’d be well within your rights to think the answer is the simplest: money. Few actors have been as open about chasing the bag as the Academy Award-winning gravitas machine, but that wasn’t his main motivating factor.
Freeman has appeared in a lot of movies, most of which have been released in the last decade, that don’t even sniff the inside of a cinema, and instead go straight to video. He isn’t making them for the love of the game, but it would have saved some red faces had 2015’s Momentum not even bothered to try its luck on the big screen.
To be fair, it wasn’t released theatrically in the United States, which probably spared its blushes. Its biggest market was Russia, randomly enough, where it cleared $250,000, but to pinpoint exactly how diabolical its showing was in the United Kingdom, all it takes is basic maths.
Momentum, which starred Olga Kurylenko as a former CIA agent who steals sensitive information that puts her in the crosshairs of nefarious forces, only played on ten screens. However, that meant that its per-screen average haul was £4.60, and when you consider the average ticket price is more than that, it means that several showings played to a completely empty house.
As bizarre as it sounds, Clint Eastwood is technically to blame. Director Stephen Campanelli cut his teeth in Hollywood as a key part of the iconic actor and filmmaker’s crew, working on well over a dozen Malpaso productions as a camera operator, including Invictus. He also worked on The Sum of All Fears and Red 2, striking up a bond with Freeman.
“I’ve done three movies with him as a camera operator, and we’ve gotten along very well,” he explained at the time. “We’ve became like friends, and he said to me, ‘When you get a movie, and you get to direct it, if you have a role for me, I’d love to it’. I said, ‘OK, great’. Luckily, he agreed to do it, so I was very blessed.”
Commendably, Freeman lent support as a United States senator in Momentum as a favour to a friend, with Campanelli cashing in on an unspoken agreement they’d made previously. Unfortunately, that favour didn’t go as planned, with the film securing the unwanted distinction of being the sonorous star’s most dismal opening weekend ever.
He volunteered, though, even if nobody could have predicted in a million years that its entire tally after three nights in cinemas would be less than 50 quid. It wasn’t the ideal outcome, but he should at least be praised for his loyalty, if nothing else.
