By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
Clint Eastwood is a Hollywood legend, having made his name in Westerns, establishing his bonafide as a rogue cop in Dirty Harry, and then stepping behind the camera for a third act as an award-winning director. At the age of 94, his career is likely coming to a close, but he went out with another directorial success in Juror #2, a taut legal thriller that has received rave reviews. The problem is that Warner Bros., the studio he’s worked with for 60 years, denied the film a wide release, and now, while advertising its December 20 arrival on Max, has the gall to advertise it as a “Max Original.”
Clint Eastwood’s Final Movie
Clint Eastwood’s final movie deserves better than to be considered a streaming original movie. Max has a few good originals, from The Flight Attendant to The Penguin, but those are series, and when it comes to movies, Warner Bros. has never had a hit Max original. That explains why they suddenly re-branded Juror #2. It’s similar to what they did to the recent Salem’s Lot remake, which was supposed to show in theaters before the studio shelved it and begrudgingly dumped it on Max after Stephen King called them out.
The fact that Juror #2 had a “theatrical run” could then be taken as a win for Clint Eastwood, but those quotes are doing some heavy lifting, as the film debuted in only 35 theaters and grossed under $300,000. Warner Bros. didn’t report numbers for the opening weekend, forcing everyone to rely on third-party sources for even that estimate. Overcoming the lack of a marketing campaign and the ability of most of America to watch it, the thriller was at least critically praised, earning a 92 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Type Of Movie Hollywood Stopped Making
Juror #2 stars Nicolas Hoult as Justin Kemp, a recovering alcoholic called in for jury duty who starts to realize that he might have committed the murder. Clint Eastwood assembled a stacked cast, including Toni Collette as the District Attorney pursuing the case for political reasons and Chris Messina as the public defender in over his head defending Gabriel Basso’s James Sythe. The supporting cast includes Keifer Sutherland, J.K. Simmons, Leslie Bibb, and Zoey Deutch.
In a world of superheroes and VFX spectacles flooding theaters, Clint Eastwood made an old-school adult drama from a unique perspective, and maybe it’s too quiet and contemplative to get attention on social media, but that doesn’t mean it should be dumped on Max. The only good thing about the streaming release date for Juror #2 is that it’s December 20, before Christmas, and perfectly timed for vacation watching.
Warner Bros. Is Alienating Directors
Warner Bros. has been making news for years for all the wrong reasons, starting back in 2020 when it actively feuded with Christopher Nolan over the release of Tenet, which did hit theaters during the COVID pandemic but destroyed years of goodwill, driving one of the greatest directors in history to Universal, which went on to produce Oppenheimer. Then, the studio killed Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, two complete films, instead of even releasing them on Max, which explains why Stephen King went after them so hard to save Salem’s Lot. Juror #2, the potential final film from Clint Eastwood, should have been a celebration and not another in a long line of bad behavior.
Cry Macho, the last film Clint Eastwood starred in, may have been a disappointing box office, but in just the last 10 years, he also helmed the award-winners American Sniper, Sully, and Richard Jewell, giving him a better hit record during that time than Robert Zemeckis, who somehow received a wide release for his experimental film Here at the same time Warner Bros dumped Juror #2. For an industry that’s complaining about the lack of movie stars, the way an American icon has been treated at the end of his career is evidence of why fewer and fewer creatives every year want to work in the studio system.
Starting on December 20, you can watch Juror #2 on Max, the streaming service kept afloat by Sopranos re-watches.
