Why Did ‘The Founder’ Flop?

Not so long ago, The Founder sounded like it had all the fixins for an trophy-winning, box office hit.

Prior to filming, Rob Seigel (The Wrestler)’s script was tied at number 13 on The Black List, an annual survey of Hollywood’s best un-produced projects; in recent years, Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s Speech and Argo all graduated from The Black List to Best Picture. The Founder‘s director, John Lee Hancock, previously helmed The Blind Side, a Best Picture nominee starring Best Actress Sandra Bullock, also the eighth highest-grossing film of blockbuster-stacked 2009 (Avatar, Up, and Star Trek, plus sequels to Transformers, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Twilight). In early 2015, The Weinstein Company [TWC]—producer of crowd-pleasing Oscar fare like The King’s Speech, Silver Linings Playbook and Quentin Tarantino‘s recent oeuvre—acquired The Founder, agreeing to work with Jeremy Renner‘s production company and scheduling a 2016 release. By then, star Michael Keaton had toplined back-to-back Best Pictures: Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) and Spotlight. “Is This The Year Michael Keaton Finally Wins His Oscar?” a Vanity Fair headline wondered in July. “Would you like fries with your Oscar, Michael Keaton?” asked E! News in their 2016 holiday movie preview. Five days before this year’s Academy Awards nominations were announced, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch raved over Keaton’s “virtually guaranteed to garner an Oscar nod” performance as Ray Kroc, the man who franchised McDonald’s, a fast-food chain serving an estimated 68 million customers in 119 countries every day. Rounding out the cast were a bevy of recognizable actors from film and television, like Laura Dern, Nick Offerman, Linda Cardellini, Patrick Wilson and BJ Novak.

In the end, The Founder garnered three nominations and zero wins this season, all from the AARP The Magazine. It was also a box office flop, generating just $3.4 million from 1,115 theaters during its eleventh-place opening weekend (The Los Angeles Times wrote that TWC paid a reported $7 million for distribution rights, anticipating a $5 million to $10 million opening weekend). Since its January 19th release, the film has grossed about $12 million in the US and another $6.5 million internationally. Deadline reported that the film had a $25 million budget.

Several theories exist as to why The Founder failed to connect with viewers in a bigger way.

From the outset, the film had a limited budget and an unforgiving 34-day shooting schedule. “I think the biggest challenge was the budget,” Hancock told Flickering Myth, noting that his team had to construct two free-standing Atlanta “restaurants” that doubled as working kitchens and film sets. In an interview with Deadline, Renner said that he thought the largest filmmaking obstacle “involved the McDonalds�� rights and the fair use of using the Golden Arches, all that stuff. You’re putting yourself in the line of fire with a giant company that can totally take you down.” As they tried to avoid a lawsuit, money was on everyone’s mind.

TWC’s own precarious finances were spelled out in a December 2015 New York Times headline: “The Weinstein Brothers Have Oscar Gold. Now They Need Cash.” The Times explained how TWC is at “a crucial moment of reckoning”—those who first invested when Harvey and Bob Weinstein left Miramax now “want a payout.” Months later, The Hollywood Reporter [THR] christened 2016’s warmest months “the summer of discontent for Harvey Weinstein” in an article that also chronicled the “string of high-ranking executive exits that began in October 2014” (according to The Los Angeles Times, TWC fired 20 percent of its employees in 2016). After interviewing anonymous sources associated with TWC, THR predicted that it “simply doesn’t have the money on hand to properly release” either The Founder or Tulip Fever, an Alicia Vikander vehicle that’s been postponed multiple times and is now set to arrive in theaters this August. THR also referenced “a growing chorus of industry voices—from producers to consultants to vendors to talent agents—who complain in interviews that TWC has failed to make payments and won’t respond to inquiries until specific legal threats are made.” While TWC had its most prolific year in 2014, when they released 14 films, in 2016 that number dwindled to six, a number that is expected to grow in 2017. Per The Times, TWC is “looking both for a large corporate transaction and for big-dollar film and television hits,” which concedes that TWC has been much worse off in the past. Back in 2009, threatened with bankruptcy, TWC underwent debt and asset restructuring that inspired this equally blunt Gawker headline: “The Weinstein Company’s Money Problems: Officially Bad.”

TWC’s balance sheet and the film’s changing release dates likely impacted The Founder‘s muted marketing campaign and confused the public (TWC did not respond to a request for comment). Initially, the film was set to debut on November 25, a slot historically reserved for prestige films that also have big box office potential. However, TWC ultimately gave that slot to another one of its films, Lion, which they believed had better awards season prospects (Lion is nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture).

The Founder was then shifted into a late summer wide release (August 5), but just a few weeks before the film was set to open, TWC decided to push the film’s launch back to December 16 (and scale it back to a limited release). This plan would eventually change, too. In the end, The Founder got a one-week run in Los Angeles that began on December 7 (so it could be eligible for awards), followed by a wide release on January 20, 2017. Discussing The Founder for an Eater article, Vox film critic Alissa Wilkinson called January, “a bad time for a movie (particularly a biopic) to gain traction—all of the awards nominees are still in theaters, and so it’s not on anyone’s radar.”

Hancock would seemingly agree. “Nobody knew about us,” Hancock told Newsweek this month. “I can’t answer the ‘why wasn’t it out there,’ but I do know it wasn’t out there. It wasn’t positioned in a way to [earn awards]. I think everybody involved realizes the error of that. I certainly learned a valuable lesson—scream more.”

While The Founder collaborators did not grace any podiums, they did get a court date. On February 6, the film’s financer, FilmNation, sued TWC, stipulating that FilmNation’s subsidiary, Speedee Distribution, had reached an agreement to ensure that TWC would not release any films within a week of The Founder. Gold, Matthew McConaughey‘s prospecting adventure, was released nationwide on January 27, 2017.

The Founder‘s opening weekend coincided with lots of activity nation-wide, from Donald Trump‘s inauguration to Women’s Marches in 600-plus cities. Still, as Eater notes, many made time for the movies—Split and xXx: The Return of Xander Cage brought in a combined $60 million. Eater questions whether Keaton’s “Hidden Fences” flub at the Golden Globes hurt The Founder‘s turnout, I think an idea put forth in a headline by the conservative blog PJ Media rings more true: “Movie Audiences Spurn Anti-Business ‘The Founder’ During Trump Inauguration Weekend.” As Kroc, Keaton espouses adages like, “Contracts are like hearts—they’re made to be broken.” When his screening concluded, the PJ Media writer heard an audience member gripe, “So that’s what you have to do to get ahead in this country!” Forbes observed that Kroc’s ruthlessness “feels eerily in sync with our post-election political reality and the rhetorical tactics that defined both the run-up to the election and the first few days of Donald Trump’s presidency.” Finally, Forbes suggested that Kroc was a forefather of Kellyanne Conway and “alternative facts”—the long-accepted story of McDonald’s neglects to credit its original creators and namesakes. No matter how little The Founder reaped from ceremonies and cash registers, it’s worth watching because the filmmakers aim to right this 77-year-old wrong.

Where to pre-order The Founder