Guillermo Del Toro's Nightmare Alley whimpered at the box office in its opening weekend, only bringing in $3 million on a $60 million budget. Del Toro's star-studded film pleased the majority of critics, but didn't seem to attract audiences, who either skipped out on the film or had preferable alternatives. There are a few reasons for this, as Nightmare Alley's box office performance had a few factors stacked against it.
Del Toro's genre-bending Nightmare Alley is the second big-screen effort that adapts the novel of the same name by William Lindsay Gresham, the first being the 1947 film directed by Edmund Goulding and starring Tyrone Power. It tells the story of Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a down-on-his-luck man who gets himself mixed up in a traveling carnival, gaining certain knowledge of the tricks used in the illusions that the carnival sells. With his new knowledge, Stanton sets off with his newfound love Molly (Rooney Mara) to start a side gig of their own, hustling the wealthy. From here, Carlisle gets mixed up with a mysterious psychiatrist (Cate Blanchett) and a problematic scheme to con a dangerous tycoon (Richard Jenkins).
One aspect that attributes to Nightmare Alley's box office failure is the simple fact that Spider-Man: No Way Home. The latest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been arguably the most anticipated film by audiences since 2019's Avengers: Endgame, leaving smaller films in its trail with a domestic opening weekend of $253 million, the largest opening of the pandemic by far. This is yet another case of a tentpole studio film overshadowing a smaller release from an auteur filmmaker, with Steven Spielberg's West Side Story remake suffering a similar fate just last weekend.
But beyond its competition with No Way Home, del Toro's latest film had a major hurdle in its way from the beginning, as the director simply has never been a major domestic box office draw. While he's an Oscar-winning auteur, respected by many in the business and in critical circles, Guillermo del Toro's films tend to not have mass appeal with audiences, as other recent films such as his 2015 gothic horror film, Crimson Peak, also failed to generate much attention from the box office. Pacific Rim did manage to generate more than $400 million worldwide, but it's domestic performance didn't come close to matching the film's substantial budget.
It seems that, without the box office to back them up, auteur directors such as del Toro are left struggling to find funding for their films, as similar creators such as Martin Scorsese and Alfonso Cuaron have had to resort to Netflix deals to obtain the funding they require for their films. With the exception of filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, it seems as though auteurs are simply not big draws for modern audiences, leaving critics and awards voters as the only bodies who these types of films en masse, and Nightmare Alley is sadly another case of this. The future of auteur cinema remains a mystery, but if these box office numbers are any indication, the future may not be so bright for smaller films on a theatrical scale.
