On paper, a genre-bending dystopian crime thriller boasting a star-studded cast that only cost $15 million to produce reads as a shoo-in for box office success, but the opposite proved to be true for Hotel Artemis.
The feature-length directorial debut of Iron Man 3 scribe Drew Pearce clearly had a screenplay worth getting invested in, seeing as the stacked ensemble boasted Jodie Foster, Dave Bautista, Jeff Goldblum, Sterling K. Brown, Charlie Day, Zachary Quinto, Sofia Boutella, Brian Tyree Henry, Jenny Slate, and even more besides, but critics and paying customers simply weren’t interested.
As well as lukewarm Rotten Tomatoes approval ratings of 57 and 35 percent from either party, Hotel Artemis couldn’t even recoup its threadbare budget at the box office, an unexpected turnaround for a high concept caper that had all of the potential in the world to be a sleeper hit.
It has proven itself to be a regular performer on streaming, though, with subscribers no doubt drawn in by its alluring premise and wall-to-wall big names, with FlixPatrol naming Starz as the latest platform to dredge the forgotten flop back up from the depths.
Foster is as solid as always in the lead role of a nurse who operates the titular – and highly illicit – facility that specializes in treating the criminal element of Los Angeles in the far-flung dystopia of 2028, but not even the cavalcade of recognizable faces and bursts of high-octane action could prevent Hotel Artemis from being condemned and boarded up from almost the second it landed in theaters.