Even after Olivia Wilde’s defense, Clint Eastwood’s ‘Richard Jewell’ flops

With “Richard Jewell,” Clint Eastwood set out do something interesting and potentially important: dramatically examine the saga of the security guard who was falsely accused of being a suspect in the bombing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

With Jewell’s story, Eastwood could tell a modern horror story: How an ordinary person’s life and reputation are nearly destroyed by powerful but unchecked federal agents and by the force of local and national media, looking for scoops and too eagerly jumping to false conclusions about the bomber’s identity.

With mostly positive reviews, “Richard Jewell” nonetheless failed to generate the kind of interest and box office to which the Oscar-winning Eastwood has become accustomed.

The film pulled in a dismal $5 million from 2,502 theaters over the weekend, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The box office for “Richard Jewell” certainly is far less than the $89 million Eastwood’s “American Sniper” earned in 2014 on its opening weekend or the $35 million brought in by “Sully” in 2016.

In the weeks leading up to the film’s opening, controversy erupted over the decision by Eastwood and Oscar-winning screenwriter Billy Ray to turn the late, real-life Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs into the film’s main villain and to falsely portray her as a promiscuous female journalist who gets her scoop about Jewell being a suspect after she sleeps with an FBI agent.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution threatened to file a defamation lawsuit against Eastwood and Warner Bros. over the film’s sex-for-story portrayal of Scruggs.

This “cliched” and “sexist” depiction of a female journalist is the main reason that many critics called the film “flawed.” To them, Eastwood and Ray undermined their argument about Jewell being victimized by the FBI and media playing fast and loose with the truth by themselves playing fast and loose with facts about Scruggs, who died in 2001.

Rolling Stone’s film critic Peter Travers wrote: “The attempt to slut-shame a reporter who’s not around to defend herself stands as a black mark in a film that otherwise hews close to the proven facts of the case.”

Similarly, the New York Times’ A.O. Scott wrote that Eastwood and Ray undermine their argument by subjecting Scruggs “to a type of profiling analogous to what Jewel endured.” The film also shows her to be “a newsroom mean girl with nothing but scorn for her female colleagues.”

“On strictly dramatic grounds, the character is, at best, a collection of lazy, sexist screenwriting clichés,” Scott added.

Ray defended the film by saying that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was trying to using this one fictionalized moment in “Richard Jewell” — Scruggs meeting up with her FBI agent source, played by Jon Hamm — to deflect attention from its own journalistically problematic decision to publish its initial story about Jewell.

“This movie is about a hero whose life was completely destroyed by myths created by the FBI and the media, specifically the AJC,” Ray told Deadline. “The AJC hung Richard Jewell, in public.”

Wilde became the focus of ire about the film’s portrayal of Scruggs, with people on Twitter questioning whether her decision to participate in Eastwood’s film amounted to a betrayal of the feminist-filmmaker credibility she earned with the smart teen girl comedy “Booksmart.”

Wilde tried to defend her work in “Richard Jewell” by writing in a series of tweets that she basically had no control over the film’s final result. She also said, “Contrary to a swath of recent headlines, I do not believe that Kathy ‘traded sex for tips.’ Nothing in my research suggested she did so, and it was never my intention to suggest she had.”

It’s hard to say whether the controversy dampened audiences’ enthusiasm for the film.

“Usually controversy, whether good or bad, helps. It didn’t seem to here,” an executive close to the movie told The Hollywood Reporter.

It could be that other forces were at work, including fan apathy for the story, the Hollywood Reporter said. Another industry insider told the Hollywood Reporter that the film’s box office ultimately could have been hurt by the fact that, unlike “American Sniper” or “Sully,” it didn’t showcase a major star, like Bradley Cooper or Tom Hanks — or even Eastwood himself.

The protagonist in “Richard Jewell” is played the lesser-known Paul Walter Hauser, with stars like Wilde, Hamm, Sam Rockwell and Kathy Bates in supporting roles.

“I think there’s limited appeal,” analyst Eric Handler of MKM Partners told the Hollywood Reporter.