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Disaster movie Geostorm proves disastrous at the box office

‘Geostorm’, the new disaster movie from Jerry Bruckheimer starring Gerard Butler, has proved a washout at the box office.

The massively delayed film, which rolled cameras back in 2014, made a woeful $13.3 million in the US over the weekend, a drop in the ocean of its reported $120 million production budget.

It picked up some better business abroad, bringing its total to $62.9 million, but it’s thought that if things don’t pick up on its release in China this weekend, it could lose Skydance and Warner Bros an estimated $50 to $100 million.

“The fact that ‘Geostorm’ looked like a mashup of every single disaster movie ever created is probably the culprit here,” box-office analyst Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Relations told The Hollywood Reporter.

“And it certainly didn’t help that our country recently faced a double whammy of storms that tore through Texas, Puerto Rico and Florida.”

Indeed, there may be considerably less appetite for movies featuring gigantic tsunamis – one poster featuring a towering wave about to cascade down a city block was pulled from circulation – considering the recent devastating hurricane season in the Atlantic.

But that’s not the only factor affecting the beleaguered movie – it’s also been panned heavily by critics.

Gerard Butler plays a satellite engineer and former space shuttle commander who is tasked with dealing with weather-controlling satellites that have gone haywire and threaten to destroy the Earth.

There’s also an additional plot involving the assassination of the president.

Originally the feature debut of ‘Independence Day’ producer Dean Devlin, action veteran Jerry Bruckheimer was brought on board to oversee re-shoots after test audiences reacted poorly to the original cut of the movie, leading to multiple push-backs of its release date.

But it seems that Bruckheimer was unable to save it.

The studio prevented critics from seeing the movie prior to its release, but now it’s out, they’re pretty scathing.

Robbie Collin in the Daily Telegraph writes: “Watching Gerard Butler solve a whodunit is like watching… chimpanzees move a piano downstairs: a kind of teeth-baring, flea-picking burlesque of recognisable human behaviour that’s funny for a while until you start to worry about the ethics of it.”

It’s out now across the UK.

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