At 88, Ridley Scott still shoots big original movies at a pace directors half his age can’t match. The flip side is that the misses have been getting more expensive, and the trend since Napoleon and Gladiator II suggests audiences will show up for Scott’s name attached to a known property but are far less certain about his standalone swings.
The Dog Stars was always going to test that proposition harder than most. A quiet, contemplative post-apocalyptic drama with no franchise hook, and a reported budget somewhere between $70 and $110 million is the kind of movie the current theatrical market punishes almost reflexively, however well-made it might be. The test results are now in, and they’re rough.
‘The Dog Stars’ Ended Its Theatrical Run as a Costly Miss for Ridley Scott
The film has closed out its theatrical run with roughly $39 million worldwide, exiting the marketplace it entered in 3,330 domestic theaters just six weeks ago as one of 2026’s clearest money losers. The 20th Century Studios release opened on Aug. 28 to $7.7 million domestically, which Box Office Mojo data shows was one of Scott’s weakest wide-release debuts this century, and the decline from there was close to vertical.
Theaters held steady through Labor Day weekend before the count was slashed to 1,030 locations, then to 110 a week later, and finally to around 100 screens, where the per-theater average dwindled to double-digit daily figures. The final domestic tally sits at just under $15 million, with another $24 million from international territories. Even against the low end of the budget range, and before accounting for marketing spend, the shortfall is substantial. Only the lower budget estimate of $70 million makes the math merely bad rather than disastrous.
The adaptation of Peter Heller’s 2012 novel cast Jacob Elordi as Hig, a pilot scraping out an existence in Colorado after a superflu pandemic, with Josh Brolin as his gruff survivalist partner and Margaret Qualley and Guy Pearce turning up as he ventures beyond the homestead chasing a mysterious radio signal. Critics landed at a mixed 41% on Rotten Tomatoes, with the general complaint being that the film was handsome but sleepy. Robert Daniels of RogerEbert.com was blunt about it, writing:
“It probably takes more effort to make a boring post-apocalyptic survivalist action film than to make a good one. If that’s the case, then Ridley Scott must’ve been working overtime on The Dog Stars.”
The New Movie Quietly Became One of 2026’s Biggest Box Office Flops
The film was shoved from a March date into the dead zone of late August, where Spider-Man: Brand New Day was still vacuuming up screens in its fifth weekend, and the long-shelved Coyote vs. Acme turned out to be the surprise draw of the frame. There’s also a reasonable argument that the marketing never found a hook, since a meditative survival story is
genuinely hard to sell to a market trained to expect 28 Years Later-style intensity from the genre. None of this is likely to slow Scott down, for what it’s worth. He has kept working through flops before and has more projects in motion, and his hit rate across five decades has earned him more rope than almost anyone. Still, The Dog Stars will presumably find a second life on streaming, where its unhurried pace might actually play better, though that’s cold comfort for the balance sheet it leaves behind.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
