Epic movie ‘The Northman’ fails at box office: Is it actually a literary film?

Recently, the long-publicized epic movie “The Northman” has been released in various countries. Interestingly, although the film was well-received and received unanimous praise from film critics, the box office results were quite embarrassing and could be called a failure.

“The Northman” is directed by horror film “The Witch”, “The Lighthouse” director Robert Eggers and stars Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe and more.

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Looking at the director and actors alone, it can be said that the lineup is strong, the subject matter is relatively grand, and there is an influence bonus from the famous book “The Tragedy of Hamlet”.

In the eyes of film critics, “The Northman” is a perfect masterpiece, full of epic feel, and still maintains the director’s audio-visual style.

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At present, “The Northman” has a freshness rating of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, and an average score of 83 points at station M, which seems to be highly recognized by the audience. However, the results were disappointing.

“The Northman” grossed only $3,383,380,000 in 15 overseas markets, including $1.17 million in the UK and $897,000 in Mexico.

Sweden, the hometown of starring Skarsgård, also had a box office of only 411,000.

And Northern America won’t be released until April 22, but I’m afraid it’s not optimistic.

Judging from audience feedback, the main problem with “The Northman” is that the narrative is too slow.

The plot of the movie is not complicated, it is the story of the Nordic prince’s revenge for the king’s father. But “The Northman” took 140 minutes to get to that point, leaving the audience feeling very tedious.

The director can either reduce the cost of making literary and artistic films, or try his best to find a balance between literature and art and business. It is impossible to want both literature and art and to make money.

Another problem is that the action scenes in the movie are bloody, and there are many very realistic and cruel pictures, such as the camera is aimed at dirty corpses and so on.

For the average audience, these scenes may make “The Northman” more of a horror movie the director is good at. This limited the audience for “The Northman” and kept the general audience at bay.

It is also an action movie with an ancient background. Last year’s “foreign language name” also had a similar problem, and it was not well received.

But blaming the demise of epic movies on impatient audiences, incomprehensible audiences, and superficial audiences doesn’t seem to explain the problem.

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