Hollywood keeps coming up with new ways to lose its collective shirt.
Remember that "Charlie's Angels" reboot from 2019? The creative team stripped much of the sex appeal from the source material, loaded it with woke bromides and watched it tank at the box office.
What did they expect?
Hollywood saw dwindling interest in the "Terminator" franchise but kept cranking out sequels anyway. Now, franchise creator James Cameron is teasing more A.I. themed movies in the saga.
Make it make sense.
More recently, Tom Cruise steered "Digger" into financial ruin, deciding it made sense to sink up to $180 million into what's essentially an arthouse film with microscopic appeal.
Now, another project is drowning in black ink, and the filmmakers have only themselves to blame.
Director Alex Gibney's "Musk" is a certifiable hit piece against the mercurial trillionaire. Sure, Elon Musk helped spark the EV movement, flexed his solar skills with SpaceX and restored freer speech via X (ex-Twitter).
Gibney still saw fit to make him a monster, one who allegedly used space lasers to help President Donald Trump win a second term.
Elon Musk used "space lasers" to steal the election for Trump, @alexgibneyfilm alleges in his new HBO movie. But that conspiracy theory was debunked in 2024. And there is no evidence to support Gibney's claim that Musk stole federal data to corrupt future elections. https://t.co/DytXlTR6lr
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) September 4, 2026
The film's popcorn bucket tie-in should be a tinfoil hat.
Naturally, the movie earned a fawning 96 percent "fresh" rating from liberal film critics. Still, could it make a dent in theaters?
Not even close.
The film just wrapped its theatrical run with less than $600K from U.S. theaters. Documentaries rarely make big bank at the cineplex, although there are exceptions. The Daily Wire's "Am I Racist?" earned $12 million in movie houses. "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" generated $22 million, and the new quasi-documentary "You Can See Everything" brought in $20 million in just one weekend.
Those aren't just ordinary exceptions. They're extraordinary on key levels. But a film like "Musk," targeting legions of far-left Americans, surely could draw a crowd, no? The media did its part, giving the release wall-to-wall coverage, most of it positive.
Here's betting the film's running time chased more than a few Jimmy Kimmel fans far, far away.
Gibney's "Musk" is nearly four hours long. Four hours for a one-sided documentary that features an A.I. version of Musk, no less.
What were they thinking? They probably weren't.
Now, if this had debuted as a two-part docuseries on, say, HBO Max, the results would have been far better. Who wants to watch a progressive screed that lasts four hours? Some patrons might have had to call their doctor if it lasted any longer.
Couldn't Gibney and co. have sliced and diced the film into a two-hour presentation? Maybe the longer version could have been a streaming original.
Mashable is trying to stir up a conspiracy about the film's failure, summoning rando Reddit users to back up its case. Woodward and Bernstein, look out!
No matter. The film's box office belly-flop shows how much ideology blinds filmmaking once more.
