I keep going back to one number on this movie. Not the Netflix chart, where Those Who Wish Me Dead has now spent sixteen days and sits at number two on the American film side. The other one. When Warner Bros. put it in 3,188 theaters in May 2021, it took $880,000 on its first day and $2.8 million across the weekend. That stands as the second-worst opening any film has ever posted while playing in more than three thousand rooms.
Five years later it is one of the most watched things in the country. That gap is interesting on its own, and plenty of people have written about it this month. What nobody seems to mention is what the director did next.
The Film Nobody Argued About
The film itself is lean and old-fashioned in a way I like. A boy named Connor sees his father killed and runs into the Montana backcountry. A smokejumper named Hannah Faber, played by Angelina Jolie, is stationed alone in a lookout tower, carrying the deaths of three children she could not reach in an earlier fire. Two hired men come after the boy. A wildfire comes after everyone. It runs a hundred minutes and wastes very little of them.
Critics were not hostile, just unmoved. Rotten Tomatoes counts 224 reviews with 63 percent positive and an average of 5.7 out of 10. Metacritic put it at 59. Scores like that give people nothing to argue about. In a spring when nearly every new film landed on a streaming service the same week it opened, an argument was most of how anyone found one.
Warner Put It in Two Places at Once
The theatrical number was not really a verdict on the film. Warner Bros. sent every one of its 2021 releases to HBO Max on the day it opened, for one month, then pulled them back. So the same Friday you could buy a ticket, you could also watch it at home for free if you already subscribed. In a spring when a lot of people were still deciding whether to sit in a room with strangers, that is not a choice most households had to think very hard about.
I wrote about Fuze two days ago, a film that topped a streaming chart after barely opening in America at all, and the shape is the same. The number a movie posts on its opening weekend has been measuring the release strategy more than the movie for a while now. What is different here is that the strategy belonged to the studio, and the cost landed on the director.
What He Was Building While It Failed
The part that changes how the weekend reads is what Taylor Sheridan was doing while it happened. The trailer says it out loud, if you were watching for it. One of its title cards introduces him as the writer of Sicario and the co-creator of Yellowstone. In 2021 the marketing was already selling the television, and he was not waiting to see how his movie did. Yellowstone had been running since 2018. In the same year this film opened he launched 1883 and Mayor of Kingstown. His own company, Bosque Ranch, is on the production credits of Those Who Wish Me Dead, and Bosque Ranch is also the ground the Yellowstone operation stands on.
The years after only widen it. Counting only the ones he created himself, ten series have carried his name in eight years, Lawmen: Bass Reeves among them, and more are announced. Somewhere in that stretch he stopped being a filmmaker who also made television and became something television did not really have a word for before him.
He Has Not Sat in That Chair Since
Sheridan has directed three features. Vile in 2011, Wind River in 2017, and this one. The middle entry is the one that matters here. Wind River premiered at Sundance, it was the one he wrote and directed himself, and it is the film that established he could do both jobs on the same picture. So the list does not read like a man who tried directing and found out he was bad at it. It reads like a man who was getting good at it. After May 2021 the list stops. He has kept writing films and producing them, and he directs plenty of television, but the job he did on Those Who Wish Me Dead is one he has not taken again in five years.
I do not think anyone drove him out. A man running that many shows at once does not look like someone nursing a grudge about a weekend. It is more that the weekend made the arithmetic plain. A director gets one opening and a studio decides the terms of it. A creator with his own ranch, his own crews, and a streaming service that wants everything he writes never has to stand still and wait for a Friday to happen to him.
So the film climbing the chart now is a strange kind of artifact. It is the last thing he made under the old terms, and it took five years and a different company to find the audience it was built for. Both halves of that are worth noticing. The movie was never the problem, and the man it belonged to had already worked out where he was going.
