Anthony Mackie once proved himself to be the most realistic man in Hollywood when he said, to paraphrase, that nobody is going to see an Anthony Mackie movie, they are going to see Falcon, and the MCU actors are not the stars; the characters are.
He wouldn’t have wanted his theory to have been proved true in such devastating fashion, though. His new movie, Desert Warrior, is shaping up to be one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time, according to Deadline.
Desert Warrior follows a princess who flees into the Arabian desert as she’s hunted by mercenaries. Forged into a warrior and aided by a legendary bandit (Mackie), she unites warring tribes for a last stand that will alter the course of history. So Lorraine Of Arabia, then?
The movie is the result of Saudi investment and has a budget of $150 million. After numerous delays, it ended up taking six years to produce. The result? Well, it’s a 27% on Rotten Tomatoes and an IMDb score of 1.9/10. The news is even worse at the box office, where it has allegedly opened already – yeah, we didn’t know either! There, it garnered $483 per-screen average and a total haul of just $487,848 from a little over 1,000 screens.
This puts it in the top tier of box office flops.
Desert Warrior stars Ben Kingsley, Sharlto Copley, and Aiysha Hart. Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) directed, but decided to exit the project when it was in post-production.
