Ridley Scott’s ‘The Dog Stars’ Officially Confirms Its Rough Opening Weekend, and the Numbers Are Grim

Late-summer box office slots have a reputation for being unforgiving, but few films illustrate that risk quite as vividly as this latest release from one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors. What began as a cautiously hopeful outlook has steadily eroded into one of the more disappointing debuts of the season.

Ridley Scott’s post-apocalyptic drama ‘The Dog Stars‘ arrived in theaters this weekend carrying the kind of star power that usually guarantees at least a respectable opening. Between Scott’s directing pedigree and a cast led by Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin, the film seemed positioned to draw meaningful crowds despite its adult-skewing tone.

That optimism has now been replaced by hard numbers. ‘The Dog Stars’ earned just $3 million on Friday from 3,330 North American theaters, with rival estimates placing its full weekend haul around $7.2 million.

That soft Friday total follows an already troubling preview night, which brought in only $850,000 the evening before, according to Variety. The film has since fallen to fourth place in the domestic box office rankings, trailing behind fresh competition and established holdovers alike.

‘The Dog Stars’ now finds itself sitting behind ‘Coyote vs. Acme,’ which secured a considerably stronger Friday performance of $5.2 million from 3,575 screens, putting it on track for a weekend total of roughly $13.5 million. Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ continued its own remarkable staying power as well, pulling in $3.7 million on its Friday alone during its seventh weekend of release, a figure expected to push the film’s domestic total past $560 million.

The film follows Hig, a former civilian pilot played by Elordi, who survives a devastating flu pandemic that wipes out most of humanity, only to be left mourning the loss of his wife while navigating a dangerous new world alongside Bangley, a hardened former Marine played by Brolin. Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Allison Janney, and Benedict Wong round out the supporting cast in the adaptation of Peter Heller’s acclaimed 2012 novel.

The scale of the film’s budget makes this outcome especially concerning for its distributors. With reported production costs ranging as high as $110 million before marketing, ‘The Dog Stars’ effectively needed a much stronger theatrical debut just to stay within reach of profitability, a bar that becomes increasingly difficult to clear the longer opening weekend numbers stay this soft.

Critical reaction has done little to help the film’s prospects either, with ‘The Dog Stars’ currently holding a 40 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes from more than 150 reviews. Audience reaction has fared somewhat better, with a more respectable score on the platform’s Popcornmeter, though that gap between critics and general viewers hasn’t been enough to meaningfully move the needle at the box office so far.

For Scott, now 88 and still remarkably prolific, this marks another challenging theatrical outing following a string of underwhelming results for recent projects. Still, the veteran filmmaker shows no signs of slowing down, with numerous high-profile projects reportedly already in various stages of development.

With international box office results still pending and word of mouth largely unproven at this early stage, ‘The Dog Stars’ will need considerable help in the coming weeks to avoid becoming one of the more costly disappointments of the year.

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