Metallica's foray into cinema, the 2013 film Through The Never was an uncontested box office bomb both in the United States and overseas.
The movie, which we gave a favorable review to, the film, which cost over $18 million dollars to make only pulled in only $3.5 million in the States and an additional $7 million overseas, so it didn't even cover it's production costs.
Last year, Kirk Hammett and Lars Ulrich were quoted with reactions as to why the movie failed but in a recent issue of Metallica's fan newseltter, "So What?," James Hetfield spoke for the first time about the commercial failure of the movie. He concedes the biggest critique about the movie: nobody knew exactly what it was…
"It's very bittersweet, the whole movie bit. We put a lot of money, time and effort into it, and how awesome we thought it was, and how 'wow, this is pretty unique' we felt about it, at the end of the day, was its downfall. It was not so much a concert film, not so much an action drama, it was somewhere in the middle; it just fell right down the crevasse. It disappeared. And it was sad to see that."
The concert footage in the film is the best concert film you will ever see, and they kept cutting away from it to a narrative that made no sense, that nobody wanted to see.
He then went on to blame the lackluster reviews and lack of availability of the movie to its downfall:
"The way life is now in the entertainment field, especially movies, two years of work came all the way up to a Friday night. 'Okay, the movie's released!' By Friday night, you know pretty much what the full picture is and how the movie is actually gonna do at the box office. But management said — and I agree with this; it makes total sense — that Hollywood is about perception. Hollywood is about rumors spreading and things like that, so if someone tweets, 'Hey, the movie's great,' if that spreads, then it helps. A lot of people don't go to movies because of reviews, I guess… I don't understand that so much."
"I will say to my wife, 'Hey, let's go see this. It looks really good!' And she'd say, 'Well, it got bad reviews. We're not going.' It's like… I don't care. It looks good to me. Let me go find out if I like it or not. A review's just another opinion. But anyway, I guess across the board it lasted in the theaters, what, two weeks? I'd tell people, 'Hey, we've got this movie out," and they'd say, 'Cool, I can't do it this week. Maybe I'll go next week.' Well, it's not gonna be around next week."
The movie got a 78% score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is much higher than most movies get, so I don't think reviews were the problem. The problem was nobody communicated well what the movie actually was. Was it a concert? Was it a narrative? Nobody knew. I remember at the time of its release, we had a booth at Comic Con and we were blaring Metallica exclusively. Countless people came up to us and asked if we heard about the movie that they were making and asked us what it was about and when it was being released. The problem was, the movie was already released meaning marketing people didn't do their job.
Also, as we pointed out previously, the movie was initially released only in IMAX theaters, and in most theaters, they only have one or two IMAX screens. Two weeks after the release of the film, Gravity was released, which was a blockbuster film and one of the highest-grossing films of the year, essentially shutting out Through the Never from any IMAX screens for the rest of the year, since why would any theater promoter avoid going with a sure thing?
Hetfield eventually concedes that maybe movie-making isn't their thing:
"It's, like, wait a minute. We go to these screenings and all the people are there and were they there to see the movie? Yeah. Would they be there if we weren't gonna show up? I don't know. It's not our forte. As simple as that. We make good music, we like touring, we like performing. And it didn't translate into the theater as well."
Well, at least you learned something. And it only cost you tens of millions of dollars.
