The first time I witnessed the trailer for “A Better Man,” which opened with a clearly-CGI monkey baring his teeth and yelling at the camera that “for the next two hours the audience was his,” I thought it was satire.
I assumed it was a comedy about a monkey trying to make it as a rockstar. But over the next month, I learned that the actual plot was somehow more nonsensical: it was a biopic about Robbie Williams, a British pop star whose career peaked in 2000.
Most Americans shared my confusion. For a movie starring a “worldwide popstar” as the trailer stated, William’s fame never really spilled out of the United Kingdom. However, the film received an astounding $110 million budget, which it has yet to make a fraction of back.
The film debuted on Jan. 10, and in its opening weekend, it grossed $1.1 million across 1,200 theatres nationally. For comparison, “The Brutalist” opened the same day to 68 theatres and amassed $1.4 million.
The budget “A Better Man” was given is irregular. Rarely does a studio spend anywhere near $100 million on most celebrities, even those with more fame than Williams. Although the band Queen has triple the monthly listeners on Spotify than Williams, their biopic, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” cost $55 million and grossed close to $1 billion.
A successful biopic needs one of two things: either it must appeal to an already established celebrity’s fan base, or the story being told must engage the audience, regardless of the subject’s prior fame. “A Better Man,” evidently, did neither.
Williams tried to launch his music career twice in the U.S. to no avail. The first attempt was in the early 1990s through his boy band “Take That.” A handful of years later, he tried again as a solo artist. Why would a movie about the music Americans have rejected twice suddenly become appealing?
Since the average American has no interest in Williams, “A Better Man”’s story should have been more alluring. Yet apart from the leading monkey, the film’s essential narrative has been told over and over.
The story of an artist finding fame and then becoming exhausted by the spotlight is not novel. “Perfect Blue,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Player” and even other biopics like “Elvis,” “The Iron Claw” and “All That Jazz” explore how success can be a double-edged sword. Why do we need to hear William’s take on the conflict that countless filmmakers have tackled before him?
Even in the U.K., where he thrived as a musician, the movie’s ticket sales were abysmal. Across the pond, the film made $1.5 million in its first weekend. Despite his position as a chart-topping artist, Williams was unable to attract even his fans to his movie.
Which leads to the elephant or rather, CGI monkey in the room. While it was a daring and original decision for Williams to be portrayed as a talking chimpanzee, ultimately, I believe it turned audiences away from the film.
“A Better Man” is rated R, yet the trailer showcased the qualities of a children’s movie. A talking animal that sings and dances seems more akin to family-friendly musicals, yet the content is geared at an adult audience.
In order to make back their budget, the film should have appealed to the general public but instead, they added an experimental element most traditional audiences would not care for.
Choosing an actor to play Williams might have drawn a larger demographic to the film. “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan biopic that was released three weeks before “A Better Man” stars Timothee Chalamet. Since Dylan’s fans are typically older, casting Chalamet, who’s popular with Generation Z draws not only listeners of Dylan but also supporters of Chalamet, ultimately capturing a multi-generational audience.
If he had chosen a current, beloved actor to represent him, he would have shared the spotlight and the fans. Instead, the film relied completely on the general public’s loyalty towards Williams, which is not strong enough to generate even a quarter of the project’s budget.
I think audiences are exhausted by biopics. One after another, each serving as a way for a celebrity to lament that while they are making more money in a year than most will see in a lifetime, they have their struggles too.
But instead of dealing with these struggles, they make another career out of it.
