How to Rob a Bank Bombs at the Box Office: David Leitch’s Heist Film Opens to Just $4 Million

David Leitch’s How to Rob a Bank has opened to one of the softest weekends of the year for a major studio action film. The Amazon MGM heist thriller, starring Nicholas Hoult, Zoë Kravitz and Pete Davidson, took around $2.2 million on Friday across 2,810 theatres and is heading for a $4–5 million opening weekend, according to trade estimates — a fraction of what a film from the director of Bullet Train and The Fall Guy was expected to draw.

The film follows a crew of social-media-savvy bank robbers, led by Hoult’s Ryan — known as “The Wolf” — who broadcast their heists online and build a viral following, unaware that their fame has put them in the crosshairs of a veteran FBI agent, played by Zoë Kravitz, and a brilliant software engineer. Anna Sawai, Rhenzy Feliz, Christian Slater and John C. Reilly co-star. The screenplay is by Mark Bianculli, and the film is produced by 87North and Imagine Entertainment for Amazon MGM Studios.

The numbers tell the story plainly. A B-minus CinemaScore from opening-day audiences and a 33 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes show that neither crowds nor critics warmed to the film, and the weekend frame around it offered no shelter: Johnny Depp’s Ebenezer took the number one spot with a $20 million-plus opening, while Godzilla Minus Zero held second in its sophomore frame with around $7.5–8 million. How to Rob a Bank was one of the weekend’s wide openers, and it finished far behind both.

Here is the Filmverse take: the irony is hard to miss — a film about robbers who go viral for views could not get audiences to show up. Leitch built his name on clean, propulsive action, but How to Rob a Bank asked its hook to do the heavy lifting: livestreamed heists are a clever premise for a trailer and a thin one for two hours, and the reviews suggest the satire never quite landed. The opening also underlines how unforgiving this November has been to anything that is not an event film — Ebenezer had Depp’s comeback, Godzilla had its record opening, and a mid-budget heist with a good cast and a good director still opened to $4 million. Our Ebenezer Friday report Our Godzilla second-weekend report

Watch the official Trailer 2 below:

How to Rob a Bank, directed by David Leitch, is in theatres now.

Source: Deadline, Variety, World of Reel and Box Office Theory. All box-office figures are trade estimates.

Team Filmverse

Filmverse is an independent entertainment news desk covering Bollywood and Indian cinema — news, trailers, reviews and box office, published daily from Mumbai.