The Northman was actually a financial success, according to its distributor. After having his first two films, The Witch and The Lighthouse, distributed by the indie studio A24, the visionary filmmaker Robert Eggers graduated onto Focus Features for his third film, The Northman, which carried an estimated $70-90 million budget. With a script co-written by the Icelandic poet Sjón and based on the legend of Amleth, the historical epic follows the Viking prince on a quest to avenge his murdered father.
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Alexander Skarsgård led The Northman as Amleth, alongside a stellar supporting cast that included the likes of Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Björk, and Willem Dafoe. The Viking epic was lauded by critics, with particular praise for Eggers' direction, elaborate set pieces, breathtaking visuals, authentic production design, and the performances of the cast. Despite all that it had going for it, The Northman bombed at the box office this past April, failing to make back its budget with a $69.6 million worldwide gross.
Despite struggling in theaters, The Northman went on to become a financial success through its home video release, according to Focus Features. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the distributor's president of production and acquisitions, Kiska Higgs, says The Northman "actually ended up being a win for us financially" due to a combination of its theatrical release and premium video on demand. Read what she had to say below:
It actually ended up being a win for us financially. There was a special set of circumstances about the theatrical release, plus PVOD. I know in the press it hasn’t been lauded as a success, but it was ok for us in the end. There are additional ways for us to monetize things, at least for us at Universal. It was one we shared with New Regency, and we weren’t really front and center on production of that. But lessons definitely have been learned from a creative perspective, but I don’t look back and think we could have done anything differently, because there were so many … Vikings in the boat.
Despite being labeled a box office bomb by many, it sounds like The Northman actually ended up being a financial success based on the executive's comments. This is great news for fans of Eggers, who would like to see him continue collaborating with high-profile distributors like Focus, which is backed by Universal and can naturally offer him larger budgets to work with. For his next project, Eggers has a few irons in the fire, such as a long-gestating Nosferatu remake and another medieval film titled The Knight, which would both be produced by Studio 8 and distributed by Sony Pictures.
While Eggers makes the kind of original, non-IP-based movies that tend to perform poorly in the modern box office landscape, an audience still clearly exists at home for these type of arthouse films. While Higgs didn't provide any exact figures for The Northman, it needed an estimated $200 million gross to break even in theaters, and while the studio takes a higher percentage of home media and PVOD releases, it still had serious ground to make up before it could be considered a success. The Northman is now available on VOD platforms, in addition to streaming on Peacock.