Jessica Chastain will be seen in the Paramount+ miniseries George & Tammy, where she will portray country music singer Tammy Wynette opposite Michael Shannon's George Jones. And, while she does occasionally delve back into lower-budget prestige work, the performer has also become a big-budget Hollywood mainstay.
Chastain has become a major box office draw, even if not all of her projects skyrocketed right off the bat. That being said, Chastain has had more profitable projects than she's had losses, as seen here by looking at Box Office Mojo's data.
The Debt (2010) — $45.6 Million
The Debt was an early film for Chastain, and with a Box Office Mojo-reported budget of $20 million, one of the biggest. It was shortly after The Debt that she found herself truly playing the lead, as opposed to the younger version of the true lead (Helen Mirren). But it showed Chastain's ability to excel both in action/espionage-drive pieces and dramatic pieces in equal measure.
That said, The Debt was more of a stepping stone to mainstream success for Chastain more than mainstream success itself. The film played in wide release but wasn't considered must-see entertainment. The film barely cleared $45 million worldwide and has mostly been forgotten in the years since.
Lawless (2012) — $55.4 Million
The 2012 bootlegging crime drama, Lawless, teamed Chastain up with a remarkable cast. Playings Maggie Beauford, she manages to steal some of the film's quieter scenes with Tom Hardy's Forrest Bondurant when he and his brother Jack (Shia LaBeouf) aren't out rum-running.
The Numbers lists the film's budget at $26 million and with a cast including Chastain, Hardy, Guy Pearce, LaBeouf, Gary Oldman, Mia Wasikowska, and Jason Clarke, it's astonishing the price tag was kept as low as it was. However, even with the stacked cast, the film only managed to clear $55.4 million worldwide.
Zero Dark Thirty (2012) — $132.8 Million
When college film classes inevitably look back on Chastain's career, they'll point to The Hurt Locker with the film, and it didn't disappoint, nor did Chastain in the intensive role of the protagonist "Maya."
Just as Zero Dark Thirty is one of Chastain's most critically-revered films, it's also one of her most successful. The movie held a fairly modest budget of $40 million (per Box Office Mojo), which is a figure it more than tripled when all worldwide ticket sales were taken into .
The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016) — $165 Million
Chris Hemsworth dropped Mjolnir after Thor and The Avengers to portray the second title character in Snow White and the Huntsman. Then, four years later, he got his own spinoff in The Huntsman: Winter's War, but unlike its predecessor, it didn't even perform like a big-budget film.
The spinoff isn't one of Chris Hemsworth's top-grossing films nor did it come close to the worldwide tally of the original. By the time it had moved on to streaming and Blu-ray, the spin-off had only generated $48.4 million from U.S. and Canadian theaters and an equally paltry $116.6 million from all international markets (per Box Office Mojo).
The Help (2011) — $216.6 Million
The Help's last focus is Chastain's Celia Foote, but she's an interesting character in her own right. Chastain makes Foote seem intelligent, but also a little naive, which can prove problematic when one is the new fish in an old, tight-knit pond.
The Help was a sizeable hit, even if time has shown it to be a somewhat whitewashed film that should have employed far more Black Americans behind the scenes (e.g. for the role as the film's director). Regardless, the late-summer hit generated nearly $170 million in domestic revenue (per Box Office Mojo) and another $47 million overseas, all on a budget of just $25 million.
X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019) — $252.4 Million
It took a bit for Chastain to get her major superhero movie and, unfortunately, it was the last main Dark Phoenix is a notorious mess, arguably even worse than X-Men: The Last Stand, and just about any audience member would be forgiven for completely forgetting Chastain is even in the movie (as the main villain, much less). She essentially plays the body the alien antagonist inhabits, as it attempts to elicit the deadly Phoenix from Jean Grey, and she does well with the role as it is given.
Dark Phoenix is one of the biggest box office bombs of all time, and it's going to remain that way for quite some time. The rebooted X-Men franchise had clearly run out of steam by the time X-Men: Apocalypse shrugged its way through theaters, so re-doing a storyline that already failed on the big screen just ended up being a misguided yet well-intentioned venture.
It paid the financial price. On a budget of $200 million (per could save it from "bomb" status.
It: Chapter Two (2019) — $473.1 Million
If there's a true main character of the Losers Club, it's not Georgie, but Beverly (Chastain), as she's the character with the greatest transformation over the course of the narrative. She's also the character with the scariest scenes (most of which don't even involve Pennywise the Dancing Clown). Lastly, she's more or less the glue that keeps the group together (in both the book and films). Chastain has to share most of her screen time, and It: Chapter 2 never gels like the first film, but the second half being inferior to the first was inevitable for It, and the performer does what she can with what he has.
The first It film cleared $300 million domestic (per Box Office Mojo), astonishing for any horror project even with King's name attached. The second film, however, barely cleared $200, and on a budget over twice as much as the original. Regardless, an $80 million dollar film (also per Box Office Mojo) scoring $470 million worldwide makes it a hit.
The Martian (2015) — $630.6 Million
Ridley Scott's The Martian spends most of its time with Mark Watney (Matt Damon), but his superior officer, Commander Melissa Lewis (Chastain), is instrumental in his ultimate rescue. It's a role that allows Chastain ample opportunity to display her range, and she knocks it out of the park.
Scott's film carried a budget of $108 million, but it was worth the gamble because it earned half that (almost exactly, fortuitously enough) over the course of its first three days in U.S. theaters. Tack on $400 million from international territories (per American Gangster.
Interstellar (2014) — $701.7 Million
Chastain had perhaps the most important role in the plot of Christopher Nolan's massively-scoped sci-fi film Interstellar. As "Murph" Cooper, the daughter of Matthew McConaughey's thought-lost NASA pilot Joseph, Chastain carries the majority of the film's emotional heft and even proves to be the key to the plot's resolution.
Interstellar had a lot of hype going for it, but the movie did okay at best in the domestic market (considering its $165 million budget, per Box Office Mojo) with $188 million. But it was overseas markets that allowed Nolan's film some profitability, with a worldwide total of just over $700 million.
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted (2012) — $746.9 Million
Chastain stepped into Dreamworks Animation's Madagascar for the third installment, which saw the gang of animal pals finding their way to a circus. It's there they meet Chastain's Gia, an Italian jaguar who is integral to the quartet's safety. Gia's best scenes are shared with Ben Stiller's Alex the lion, and those alone are enough to make Gia an excellent addition to the franchise.
There hasn't been a fourth official installment of the franchise (though the Penguins still do quite well), but Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted was one of Summer 2012's biggest hits. It was granted a fairly massive budget of $145 million but beat that figure domestically with $216 million. However, the film's overseas gross of $530.5 million (per Box Office Mojo) should have guaranteed another sequel well before 2022.
