Grimsby Is A Huge Flop At The US Box Office

It’s bad news for Sacha Baron Cohen… his new movie ‘Grimsby’, or 'The Brothers Grimsby’ as it’s known in the US, has nose-dived at the box office.

It took a pretty catastrophic £2 million, having been released on a not insubstantial 2,235 screens across the country.

That’s not even £1000 per screen, meaning that the movie has the ignominious honour of making it into the top 50 worst openings of all time, at number 36.

- People of Grimsby slate Sacha Baron Cohen’s accent
- 10 movies that offended real places
- Sony denies it asked for Trump gag removal from Grimsby

With its foreign take of £7.8 million, it’s sitting at just under £10 million in all, rather shy of its £24 million production budget and then the sturdy amount spent on marketing, press and advertising.

Directed by action helmsman Louis Leterrier, it’s by far Cohen’s biggest flop. Even the widely unloved 'The Dictator’ from 2012 made nearly $180 million (£125 million).

'Grimsby’, in which Cohen stars as a booze-soaked football hooligan who finds that his estranged brother, played by Mark Strong, is a spy with whom he then goes on the run, has suffered pretty scathing reviews too.

Sight & Sound called it 'witless rubbish’, while Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian added: “Sacha Baron Cohen brings his B-game - or maybe even his C-game - to this moderate new comedy that basically defeated my attempts to like it.”

Those who enjoyed it appeared to do so guiltily, Darren Franich in Entertainment Weekly admitting 'God help me, I laughed’.

The people of Grimsby, meanwhile, have not been out in their droves to see it.

His accent has been slated for being distinctly more Yorkshire than Humberside.

Said one resident: “Sacha Baron Cohen’s Grimsby accent is comparable to Dick van Dyke’s cockney attempt in Mary Poppins… they’re both terrible.”

Image credits: Sony