‘Lost City’ Becomes Sandra Bullock’s Eleventh $100 Million Grosser

In more good news for Paramount this morning, Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum’s The Lost City is passing $100 million domestic as we speak. The original, star+concept release, which opened with $30 million in late March, had $99.8 million as of Wednesday. If it didn’t cross the dotted line yesterday, it sure as hell is today. This is the first straight-up studio comedy (even the few action sequences are mostly played for laughs) to pass $100 million in North America since Sony’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ($141 million) in July of 2019. Yes, it’s also the first romantic comedy or romantic drama to do so since Little Women ($109 million) in late 2019.

The film’s continued legs even with concurrent availability on Paramount+ and priced-to-buy VOD is yet more evidence that, at least with the less high-profile streaming sites (Peacock, Paramount+, etc.) a shorter theatrical window need not be fatal to a well-liked opener’s post-debut legs. The Batman cratered after arriving on HBO Max (after earning $370 million domestic, natch), but it’s not like the Matt Reeves film was otherwise flirting with $400 million domestic. Since most big movies, even leggy ones, do 88-92% of their domestic total in the first 38 days, a 45-day window might be “doable” if studios don’t start “training” consumers to wait 1.5 months for something they’d otherwise see in theaters.

It’s no secret both genres (straight comedies sans action/fantasy/horror and rom-coms) have become endangered amid the rise of the franchise-specific tentpole. Various genres have seen their specific pleasures assimilated by Marvel and DC superhero movies. Why go to a straight-up comedy, heist flick, western, crime drama or coming-of-age story when you can get that and more with the likes of Deadpool, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Logan, The Batman and Spider-Man: No Way Home? Moreover, when marquee characters are prized above IP and filmmakers, old-school movie stars are few and far between. Heck, The Lost City is the first live-action original to pass that benchmark since Knives Out in November of 2019 (or 1917 in January 2020).

So, it damn well matters that an original, non-fantastical, non-IP star vehicle genre flick is doing damn well. Yes, the likely blow-out opening of Top Gun: Maverick shows the value of Tom Cruise playing a marquee character (akin to Harrison Ford as Dr. Jones in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), but it’s not like Cruise’s non-Mission: Impossible movies have been crushing it for the last 15 years. And yes, while Channing Tatum absolutely deserves credit for pulling in audiences (as we saw with Dog and its $62 million domestic cume, he’s still bankable when he’s not playing an action hero), this is another feather in Sandra Bullock’s very large cap.

This is Bullock’s 11th $100 million-plus grosser, admittedly counting her voice-over turns in The Prince of Egypt and Minions. That’s above any actress save for Julia Roberts (who had 12 such releases from Pretty Woman in 1990 to Wonder in 2017) and Scarlett Johansson (who had also had 12 such films although eight them were via the MCU). It makes Bullock the first actress to have $100 million earners in live-action star vehicles over four different decades. She hit paydirt in the 1990s (Speed, A Time to Kill and The Prince of Egypt), the 2000s (Miss Congeniality, The Proposal, The Blind Side), the 2010s (The Heat, Gravity, Minions and Ocean’s 8) and now the 2020’s (The Lost City).

Most of these films were not action-fantasy franchise flicks. As I’ve frankly been saying since Gravity opened with $55 million in October of 2013, Bullock remains one of the last butts-in-seats movie stars even for a non-franchise, non-IP offering. Once The Lost City passes $101 million, it’ll have surpassed every non-Mission: Impossible Tom Cruise film save for War of the Worlds (and, probably by Sunday or Monday, Top Gun: Maverick) since The Last Samurai ($111 million) in 2003. In an industry that (stereotypically) puts actresses out to pasture by the time they hit 40, it’s worth noting that 57-year-old Bullock is still headlining splashy and sexy rom-coms 30 years after Love Potion No. 9.

Aside from institutional sexism in terms of who gets crowned a “star” in pop culture, one reason she isn’t often discussed alongside her main peer (Leonardo DiCaprio) is one of the reasons she remains viable. When she’s not making a movie or promoting a movie, she essentially disappears from public view. She doesn’t bum around on social media, and she doesn’t engage with the media just to keep herself in the news cycle. Conversely, the only place to see Sandra Bullock is in a Bullock movie, whether it’s a theatrical hit or a Netflix juggernaut like Bird Box and The Unforgivable. She’s a modern-day movie star because she’s still mostly defined by her movies.