It’s No Surprise This Movie Is Bombing
By Movieguide® Contributor
MICKEY 17 just proved Movieguide®’s Annual Report to the Entertainment Industry Right, once again.
Every year, Movieguide® proves that movies with more moral, biblical, uplifting content succeed in the box office, while movies with an anti-Christian agenda fail. In the case of MICKEY 17, the movie has lost almost $100 million as a “ham-fisted, hateful piece of Marxist propaganda.”
According to the Movieguide® review:
In the English language movie MICKEY 17, Oscar winning South Korean filmmaker Boon Jong Ho adds Christianity to his usual Marxist attack on capitalist society. MICKEY 17 tells a science fiction story about a young man who unwittingly agrees to be killed and cloned repeatedly as part of a system designed to detect deadly diseases and other fatal dangers on a new planet that’s being colonized. Leading the expedition is a Christian company founded and led by a religious fanatic and controversial politician from Earth who bears a disposition strikingly similar to Donald Trump’s. Things come to a head when the politician puts the whole colony in danger. …
Part of MICKEY 17 has a theme of death, sacrifice and resurrection. However, the sacrificial martyrdom in the movie comes with a villain being deliberately killed at the same time. This resembles Islamic martyrdom, not the kind of Christian sacrifice and martyrdom the Bible extols. Also, the head villain is the Christian politician, who’s depicted in a hateful, despicable manner. As the main villain, Mark Ruffalo gives an over-the-top performance that mimics Donald Trump. At least twice in the movie, his character is depicted singing some kind of crazy pseudo-Christian hymn with other people. Also, his top Christian aide is very obsequious, and his wife is outrageously obnoxious. The melodramatic, clownish nature of all this not only makes the movie’s anti-Christian attacks more annoying. It also mars MICKEY 17’s artistic and entertainment quality. The main villain in a movie that aims to entertain people shouldn’t be too clownish. Otherwise, you undercut the story’s credibility.
It’s not a message people want to support.
Because of the movie’s budget, it “needs to earn around $275 million to $300 million globally to get into the black during its big screen run, according to rival executives with knowledge of similar productions.”
Thus far, it’s made a measely $19 million on its $118 million budget.
Senior Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian told Variety, “Amidst a series of low grossing weekends, we have to await the next inevitable upturn at the theatrical box office. The best way to assess the theatrical marketplace is to take a broad view rather than allowing a few lackluster weeks to spark sweeping negative pronouncements of the long-term health of the entire industry.”
However, the reason the box office is down isn’t necessarily due to slow movie theaters. It is because moviegoers don’t want to see films with high foul content, they want to see films that have family and faith aspects.
Related: Box Office Bombs Mean This for Apple’s Streaming Budget
In another interview with Entertainment Weekly, Dergarabedian said, “There is this mainstream bubble that is marginalizing these types of films, and we do underestimate them,” he said of faith-based films.
“The faith-based films may be bolstered by perhaps the most grassroots of all movie marketing, which is at the church level,” Dergarabedian added. “It’s like having a watercooler discussion at work, but you’re having a watercooler discussion in front of a church. You can imagine that, on Easter Sunday, when the leader of the flock is up there [giving a] sermon, it might be about going to see [a movie like the upcoming Jim Caviezel film] Paul, Apostle of Christ.”
The 2025 Annual Report to the Entertainment Industry shows that the most family-friendly movies averaged $59.66 million per movie in 2024 in the United States and Canada, more than three times as much money compared to the least family-friendly movies with the most offensive, obscene, anti-family, immoral content, which averaged only $18.08 million.
“The evidence is still abundantly clear,” said Dr. Ted Baehr, founder and publisher of Movieguide®. “Moviegoers prefer family-friendly movies by significant margins. Hollywood should remove lewd content from its movies.
R-rated movies didn’t do much better than the offensive, anti-family movies, averaging only $30.85 million per movie among the major theatrical releases.
The study also found that movies released in 2024 with no explicit sex or sexual nudity earned the most money on average.
Movieguide®’s Annual Report to the Entertainment Industry extensively analyzed the content of the top movies released by the major studios in Hollywood earning $3 million or more, including the major independent studios.
Dr. Baehr noted that the Annual Report, now in its 34th year, doesn’t just examine family movies and cartoons for children, but family-friendly movies with the cleanest, most inspiring, and least offensive content.
“Most people want to see Good conquer evil, Truth triumph over falsehood, Justice prevail over injustice, Liberty conquer tyranny, and Beauty overcome ugliness,” he added.
In this case, MICKEY 17 falls flat.
- Content: +2Share:
- Content: +3