Box Office Poison: ‘Shock and Awe’ Is Director Rob Reiner’s 6th Mega-Flop in a Row

Director Rob Reiner at the Q&A for the screening of And So It Goes at the ShowPlace IC
Barry Brecheisen/Invision/AP

Shock and Awe director Rob Reiner has now directed six mega-flops in a row and has not had anything approaching a hit since 2007.

This weekend, Reiner’s Shock and Awe crashed and burned at the box office. For some reason, even though it is 2018, Reiner is still wasting millions of dollars to attack former President George W. Bush. This, even after every single movie attacking Bush bombed.

What’s more, as if to prove just how insulated he is from real America, Shock and Awe tries to make heroes of journalists, a group currently enjoying approval ratings little better than child molesters.

And so, even with a cast that includes Woody Harrelson, Milla Jovovich, Jessica Biel and Tommy Lee Jones, Shock and Awe could only attract a humiliating $410 per screen average, which means if you threw a hand grenade into any one of the 100 theaters it screened in, chances are pretty good no one would have gotten hurt.

Based on the anti-Bush garbage I have personally had to sit through over the last dozen or so years, I would have been grateful for the opportunity to chase that hand grenade down and jump on it.

This is just the latest awful career news for the far-left Reiner, because Shock and Awe now represents his sixth mega-flop in a row.

To be clear, I am not qualifying a box office “disappointment” or an “under-performer” as a mega-flop.  Reiner has not only not had a hit in 11 years, since 2007’s The Bucket List, everything he has directed has been a box office catastrophe.

In 2010, Reiner directed the $14 million Flipped — it grossed less than $2 million. That is not a typo — less than TWO million dollars. Things got a lot worse two years later.

Despite the presence of Morgan Freeman and a budget of just $5 million, The Magic of Bell Isle, which Reiner both wrote and directed, lost every penny due to a — and again this is not a typo — gross of just $102,388.

In 2014, with no less than Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton on the poster, And So It Goes bottomed out in wide release (1762 theaters) with just $15 million domestic, which did not even cover its $18 million production budget. Add at least as much for publicity, and you are talking about a $20 million loss.

Reiner’s Being Charlie performed so poorly in May of 2016, it never expanded beyond 14 screens and managed to only gross $30,400.

The following year, Reiner’s $20 million biopic LBJ ranked as an even bigger catastrophe, with a horrific $2.47 million gross after opening in 659 theaters. This one starred Woody Harrelson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Richard Jenkins.

Reiner also appears to have lost his touch creatively. There are plenty of box office disasters that still rank as good, even great movies. This is not the case for Reiner. Critics savaged all six of these flops with embarrassingly low Rotten Tomatoes’ scores. Flipped: 54 percent, The Magic of Belle Isle: 30 percent, And So It Goes: 18 percent, Being Charlie: 24 percent, LBJ: 55 percent, and Shock and Awe: 35 percent.

The truth is that the 71-year-old Reiner hit his creative peak two decades ago with The American President in 1995. And even if you set aside Meathead’s dismal box office performance, over the last 22-years, Reiner has directed 11 movies, not a single one of them memorable.

The man who gave us This Is Spinal Tap (1984), The Sure Thing (1986), Stand By Me (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally (1989), Misery (1990),  A Few Good Men (1992), and The American President (1995), has been embarrassing himself for two decades now, not just creatively, but with his unhinged political ravings.

Does no one love Rob Reiner enough to buy him some self-awareness and a rocking chair?

 

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.