Ben Affleck Responds After Ridley Scott Blames Millennials And Phones For The Last Duel Flopping

Ben Affleck has shared his opinions after The Last Duel director Ridley Scott claimed the movie did badly at the box office due to millennials and their phones. 

The Last Duel - which stars Affleck alongside Matt Damon, Adam Driver and Jodie Comer and follows the conflict between two squires in Medieval France after one of them viciously assaults the other's wife - was not a hit with movie goers.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, it pulled in around $10 million at the domestic box office, from a reported budget of $100 million. 

Scott has previously blamed the movie’s poor reception on millennial audiences and their smartphones. 

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Speaking on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, Scott said: “What we’ve got today… the audiences who were brought up on these f***ing cell phones.

“The millennian do not ever want to be taught anything unless you’re told it on the cellphone.” 

Now Affleck has weighed in on the situation, he told The Hollywood Reporter there was a chance Scott was ‘slightly misquoted’ when it came to the remarks and went on to give his opinion on why the movie didn’t do too well.

Moving away from millennials and phones, Affleck reckons the movie’s limited success is down to how the movie industry is changing and insists that it’s a ‘good movie’. 

He explained: “Really, the truth is that I’ve had movies that didn’t work that bombed, that weren’t good.

"It’s very easy to understand that and why it happened. The movie is s***, people don’t want to see it, right? 

“This movie, The Last Duel, I really like. It's good and it plays - I saw it play with audiences and now it's playing well on streaming. 

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"It wasn't one of those films that you say, 'Oh boy, I wish my movie had worked.'

"Instead, this is more due to a seismic shift that I'm seeing, and I'm having this conversation with every single person I know."

He went on to say that now the kinds of people who want to see ‘complicated, adult, non-IP dramas’ are the same people who also don’t fancy going to see a cinema and would rather ‘pause it, go to the bathroom, finish it tomorrow’. 

Alongside this, Affleck says the fact that we can now watch movies at home ‘with good quality’ on huge TV screens with surround sound means fewer folks will turn out to go to the cinema.

Topics: TV and Film

Claire Reid

Claire is a journalist at LADbible who, after dossing around for a few years, went to Liverpool John Moores University. She graduated with a degree in Journalism and a whole load of debt. When not writing words in exchange for money she is usually at home watching serial killer documentaries surrounded by cats. You can contact Claire at [email protected]