by When we think of today’s biggest Hollywood stars, Margot Robbie comes to mind. But look at her filmography and something becomes immediately clear: she rarely has any significant box office success.
The thing is, Robbie got incredibly lucky when she landed one of her earliest film roles in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. An impressive performance as Naomi, the wife of Leonardo DiCaprio’s shameless Jordan Belfort, established her as a chameleon talent, and even though she was just 22 at the time of filming, she brought a maturity to the role which suggested that she knew exactly how to navigate Hollywood.
And she did, at least for a start. Robbie subsequently picked some big blockbuster roles which kept her in the spotlight, like The Legend of Tarzan and Suicide Squad, the latter becoming one of 2016’s highest-grossing films. As Harley Quinn, Robbie was unavoidable; there must have been a million people that Halloween donning ‘Daddy’s Lil Monster’ T-shirts, drawing hearts on their cheeks, and putting up their hair in blue and pink bunches.
An Oscar nomination then came for her role in I, Tonya, which not only impressed critics but did pretty well at the box office, too. Was Robbie going to continue delivering a mixture of commercial successes of both the blockbuster and slightly more artsy variety? No, sadly not.
An overwhelming number of box-office bombs have since followed, which calls into question something that no one wants to hear. Maybe Robbie is actually box-office poison. I don’t want to sound too harsh here, but really, the amount of commercial flops she has starred in over recent years is actually quite staggering for someone of her status in Hollywood.
Terminal, Slaughterhouse Rulez, Dreamland, Bombshell, Birds of Prey, The Suicide Squad, Amsterdam, Babylon: while some of these were reviewed positively (and she did earn an Oscar nomination for Bombshell, to be fair), none of them fared well at the box office, losing several million against their budgets. Amsterdam was one of the most unfortunate, losing the studio around over $100million. That’s got to hurt.
How, then, does she keep landing starring roles when she continuously leads movies that lose studios millions? The thing is, Robbie is a great, versatile actor, and for all these major flops, she has had enough successes to keep studios interested in her potential. At the end of the day, she is hugely popular and widely admired, so it’s worth the gamble, because that might just result in something like Barbie.
In 2023, Robbie was everywhere as she promoted Greta Gerwig’s Mattel doll movie, in which she starred as the iconic toy who suddenly gains consciousness of the real world, where sexism is deeply woven into the fabric of society. Cinema hadn’t seen a hit that big in a long time; not only did it gross over $1billion, but there was an insane merchandising push along with it, from Airbnb to Starbucks and Primark. Anything you wanted, you could get it Barbie-themed, bedecked in pink to the hilt.
Other successes have come in the form of some rather random titles, like the Peter Rabbit series, in which she only has a voice role. Of course, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood and Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City were hits, too, but there was no doubt about either movie doing well; they are two of the most popular filmmakers in the current cinematic landscape.
So, was Barbie just an anomaly? The release of Robbie’s latest film, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, is already heading towards failure, with its current box-office gross sitting at $8m against a $45m budget. Despite a rather hefty marketing push, it seems like people aren’t interested in the corny, overtly sentimental romantic drama, which practically looked destined to fail as soon as the trailer dropped.
Her next movie, Wuthering Heights, is also looking like it’ll be a box office disaster if the controversial discourse surrounding it is anything to go by. People aren’t happy with her casting (in what world is she the right person to play a 19-year-old girl living in 1800s-era Yorkshire?), or Jacob Elordi’s for that matter, and with critical response from test screenings coming back rather negative, it seems like the blonde actor is going to add another flop to her repertoire.
Can we call Robbie box-office poison? It feels mean, but when you look at the statistics, it really does make you question how the actor has maintained such a successful leading star status when these movies repeatedly crash and burn, at least commercially.
She certainly has talent, and with her successful endeavours in producing, it seems like Robbie has enough momentum behind her to star in whatever she pleases. With the staggering success of Barbie in her back pocket, she won’t be disappearing from screens anytime soon, even though, in the grand scheme of her career, it is quite the anomaly.
