Alex Gibney’s ‘Musk’ Flops at the Box Office With $290K Weekend, $614 Per-Screen Average

Alex Gibney's "Musk" expanded to 472 theaters this weekend and grossed just $290,000. That's a $614 per-screen average. Ouch.

And it happened mere days after Elon Musk went viral for unveiling his new Tesla Roadster, a "flying car" that had the internet watching a car leave the ground and freaking out. Musk even got a shout-out from "Back to the Future" star Christopher Lloyd, who tweeted, "Finally, a flying car."

Releasing a nearly four-hour takedown of Musk that same week? Not ideal.

Still, I doubt it was bad timing so much as that four-hour runtime, which is a tough sell for anyone not obsessed with the subject. This is a Alex Gibney film with plenty of press attention and solid reviews behind it. It should've done better than this.

Meanwhile, look at what A24 pulled off with "You Can See Everything," which opened to a stunning $15M on 800+ screens, driven mostly by audiences under 35. So people will show up for a story about a tech figure who fell from grace. They just didn't show up for this one.

The excuses have already started. Bleecker Street says the film struggled to advertise on X and TikTok, and that the latter permanently suspended its ad account this weekend — the social media platform later clarified it was an “error.” That said, let's not pretend a TikTok account was the difference-maker here.

The more likely explanation? Elon fans aren't paying to watch a hit piece, and his detractors aren't paying to sit through a four-hour doc about a man they hate. So who exactly was this movie for? The people who stay neutral whenever Elon's name comes up? Does such a person even exist?

With four years of production, an AI avatar and the kind of legal vetting you need when the world's richest man is threatening to sue, "Musk" didn't come cheap, at least as far as docs go. No official figure has been reported, but best guess is the budget landed somewhere in the $10M–15M range. HBO pre-bought the streaming rights, so this was never going to live or die in theaters, but that was before David Ellison took over, and his family is very close to Elon. Don't be surprised if the streaming release gets quietly squashed.