It sounds like the buildup to a joke, but did you hear the one about an Academy Award-winning actor, Batman, and one of the 21st Century’s biggest box office draws walking into a historical epic? Of course you didn’t, because Waiting for the Barbarians tanked thunderously after being sent out to die at the box office during the theatrical industry’s worst period of the modern era.
Releasing any movie in the summer of 2020 was doomed to fail for obvious reasons, but even then, the adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s novel of the same name didn’t stand a chance. Reviews were mediocre across the board, the buzz was virtually nonexistent, and if Christopher Nolan’s Tenet ended up losing a fortune after opting for a big screen rollout at the height of the pandemic, then director Ciro Guerra’s period piece never stood a chance.
Sure enough, not even the presence of Mark Rylance, Robert Pattinson, and Johnny Depp could convince paying customers to put on their masks and head down to their local multiplex, with the film ultimately bringing in just $765,000 in ticket sales, with a muted performance on VOD hardly doing much to swell the coffers.
Despite being completely and totally forgotten about already by the vast majority of viewers, Waiting for the Barbarians has decided to quell an uprising on streaming by suddenly exploding in popularity on the Starz most-watched charts, per FlixPatrol. Prisoners of war being interrogated unscrupulously at an isolated outpost has evidently become the highly specific itch that demands to be scratched, but at least it’s being watched.