Detroit (2016 film) Kathryn Bigelow

Box office

Detroit grossed $16.8 million in the United States and Canada and $7.3 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $24.1 million, against a production budget of $34 million.[4]

In North America, the film grossed $350,190 its limited-opening weekend from 20 theaters (an average of $17,510), finishing 16th at the box office.[33] It had its wide expansion alongside Kidnap and The Dark Tower, and was initially projected to gross $10–15 million from 3,007 theaters over the weekend.[34] After making $525,000 (more than the $515,482 it made its entire week of limited release) from Thursday previews, the film made $2.6 million on its first day, and the projection for its wide-opening weekend gross was lowered to $7.5 million.[35] The film went on to open to $7.1 million, finishing 8th at the box office. 40% of its opening weekend audience were African American. Deadline Hollywood said the film could have done better if it had been released in the fall, during festivals and awards season.[36] Its second weekend of wide release, the film grossed $2.9 million, dropping 59.5% (above average for an adult drama) and finishing in 13th.[37] The following week, the film was pulled from 1,579 theaters and grossed $850,000 (a drop of 70.9%).[38]

Critical response

The film received praise for its direction, script, and performances, especially those of Poulter, Boyega, and Smith.[7][8] On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, it has an approval rating of 82% based on 305 reviews, with an average score of 7.6/10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "Detroit delivers a gut-wrenching – and essential – dramatisation of a tragic chapter from America's past that draws distressing parallels to the present."[39] On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 77 out of 100, based on 49 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[40] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported filmgoers gave it an 86% overall positive score and a 63% "definite recommend".[35]

Richard Roeper of Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 4 out of 4 stars and called it one of 2017's best, saying: "Journalist-screenwriter Mark Boal (Bigelow's collaborator on The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty) does a magnificent job of juggling the multiple storylines and creating fully authentic characters—some flawed, some basically decent, some evil."[41] Writing for Rolling Stone, Peter Travers praised the cast and script, giving the film 3.5/4 stars and saying: "Detroit is far more than a liberal howl against the escalating toxicity of racism in America. Bigelow, with the same immersive intensity that Christopher Nolan brings to Dunkirk, smacks us down in the middle of a brutal historical event so we can see it – and feel it – for ourselves."[42]

Conversely, Alexander Nazaryan of Newsweek wrote: "[Bigelow's] characters never come alive, moving through the film less as people than entries in a sociology textbook ... If Bigelow could get inside the minds of soldiers suffocated by post-traumatic stress disorder, as she did so capably in The Hurt Locker, she can get into the mind of anyone. In Zero Dark Thirty, she made even CIA interrogators likeable. The characters in Detroit, though, black and white, are as flat as the plains of the Upper Midwest."[43]

Several critics noted the film's questionable take on a predominantly African American-based story. A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote: "It is curious that a movie set against a backdrop of black resistance and rebellion—however inchoate and self-destructive its expression may have been—should become a tale of black helplessness and passivity. The white men, the decent ones as much as the brutes, have the answers, the power, the agency."[44] K. Austin Collins of The Ringer wrote: "This movie isn't really about black people as people, nor history as a lived experience, but is instead invested in a dutiful, 'just the facts, ma'am' reenactment that pretends those other things are already a given. Boal, and Bigelow beside him, refuse to speculate about — or imagine — the rest."[45]

The New Yorker's Richard Brody called the film "a moral failure", saying: "[Bigelow's] intentions come through clearly: to depict an incident—and a climate—of racism, to show that the cruelty of these deeds was multiplied by their ultimate impunity, and to suggest that, in the intervening half-century since the events depicted in the film took place, little has changed. Movies aren't made with intentions, though; they're made with people and with equipment, and what Bigelow has her actors do for the benefit of the camera is repellent to imagine."[46]

Accolades