Box office The Last Duel grossed $10.9 million in the United States and Canada and $19.7 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $30.6million. After making $1.8 million on its first day, including $350,000 from Thursday night previews, estimates were lowered to $5 million. It ended up debuting to $4.8 million, finishing fifth at the box office and marking the worst opening of Scott's career.
Deadline Hollywood attributed the underperformance to the two-and-a-half-hour runtime limiting the number of showings, the subject matter being hard to market, the 45+ age demo not fully returning to theaters yet, and competition from
Halloween Kills and
No Time to Die. Several publications labeled the film a box-office bomb, and noted that 20th Century would likely lose millions on it. It fell 55% in its second weekend to $2.1 million, falling to seventh. The third weekend saw a drop of 78% to $558,000, for a domestic gross of around $10 million. During an interview on the podcast
WTF with Marc Maron in November 2021, Scott blamed the film's box-office failure on
millennials, saying: "I think what it boils down to — what we've got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these fucking cell phones. The millennian do not ever want to be taught anything unless you are told it on the cell phone". Ben Affleck, who co-wrote the film with co-lead Matt Damon and Nicole Holofcener, was more measured in his assessment of the film's financial failure:I've had bad movies that didn't work and I didn't blink. I know why people didn't go–because they weren't good. But I liked what we did. I like what we had to say. I'm really proud of it. So I was really confused. And then to see that it did well on streaming, I thought, "Well, there you go. That's where the audience is."
Critical response The website's critics consensus reads: "
The Last Duels critique of systemic misogyny isn't as effective as it might have been, but it remains a well-acted and thought-provoking drama infused with epic grandeur." On
Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 67 out of 100 based on 50 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Audiences polled by
CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale, while those at
PostTrak gave it a 72% positive score. Reviewing the film for
TheWrap, Asher Luberto praised the performances and cinematography while criticizing the screenplay, writing: "Adapting Eric Jager's 2004 non-fiction book with screenwriters Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener, Scott spins a medieval yarn that is by turns gruesome, grotesque, gorgeous and inconsistent." Ben Croll of
IndieWire, who gave the film a "B+" grade, praised it as "something all too rare on the current Hollywood field of battle: an intelligent and genuinely daring big budget melee that is — above all else — the product of recognizable artistic collaboration."
Kyle Smith of
National Review wrote that the film was "absolutely soaked in fascinating strangeness", adding: "It works because it doesn’t try to retrofit the facts of the past to fit the assumptions of the present." Linda Marric of
The Jewish Chronicle gave the film a score of five out of five stars, describing it as "a true return to form for Scott and a brilliant testament to Affleck and Damon's unparalleled screenwriting expertise." Deborah Ross of
The Spectator described the film as "bleak, brutal and bloody with little respite – aside from Affleck's Count Pierre, who is nicely bitchy."
Kevin Maher of
The Times gave the film a score of four out of five, describing it as "a medieval epic that is perhaps [Scott's] most modern movie yet". Reviewers from
NPR's
Fresh Air,
The Atlantic,
The A.V. Club, and
CNN all compared
The Last Duel to
Akira Kurosawa's film
Rashomon (1950).
Mark Kermode of
The Observer gave the film a score of three out of five stars, saying that it "plays like an armour-clad reimagining of
Rashomon crossed with a
#MeToo-inflected remake of
Straw Dogs." He added that the film "has a tendency to mirror its central battle's attempts to address complex issues with the blunt tool of rabble-rousing spectacle." Charlotte O'Sullivan of the
Evening Standard gave the film three out of five stars, describing it as "a handsome, well-researched drama that's by turns earnest, amusing and unintentionally funny."
Joe Morgenstern of
The Wall Street Journal praised the film's production values, performances and primary theme, but wrote: "the narrative is cluttered with court intrigue against a background of repetitive battles, and the storytelling structure is exhausting." Brian Lowry of
CNN wrote that the film "is muddy, bloody and grim but too drawn out in filtering 14th-century feudal norms through a modern prism." David Fear of
Rolling Stone said that the film "ends up perching so close to parody at times that you'd swear the full title was ''
Monty Python's The Last Duel''."
Accolades ==References==