On the surface, a $115 million action thriller directed by the acclaimed filmmaker behind Margin Call, that boasted a script from the Academy Award-winning writer of The Hurt Locker, and featured a star-studded ensemble cast headlined by Ben Affleck, Pedro Pascal, Oscar Isaac, and Charlie Hunnam sounds like a shoo-in for success, but Triple Frontier was as close to a bomb as you can get on streaming.
Even though the high-octane blockbuster landed a solid Rotten Tomatoes score of 70 percent and came with a stacked roster of talent attached on either side of the camera, it wouldn’t be unfair to say nobody really cared that it was dumped onto the content library to little fanfare in March of 2019.
To rub further salt into the wounds, Triple Frontier was only watched by 52 million households in the first four weeks it was available, which made it the streaming service’s 28th most-watched original feature ever at the time. That’s fairly disastrous given the sum of its parts, but writer Mark Boal did at least admit to The Playlist that he distanced himself from the film a long time ago.
“It changed. The movie came out nine years after [I wrote it]. So I didn’t have anything to do with the project for the last seven or eight years of its life. And I had not seen the script or any of it until it was all over. So, it’s J.C. Chandor’s piece, for good or bad.”
That’s a fairly definitive disowning, but it’s not as though anyone is clamoring for the inside track on what really happened during development on Triple Frontier, for the inescapable reason that nobody cares. It’s only been three and half years since it premiered, and it’s already been long lost to the ever-shifting sands of streaming.