The Elon Musk documentary flopped at home — now it's going where Teslas stopped selling
Alex Gibney's four-hour Musk portrait made $614 per screen in the US. Universal's answer is a tour of the countries that stopped buying the man's cars.
The American numbers for Musk are brutal. Alex Gibney's documentary opened October 9 at 4 theaters, expanded to 472 screens in week two — where it grossed $290,000, a $614 per-screen average — and collapsed to 63 theaters by week three, with about $730,000 in the till. Musk himself worked the refs throughout, calling the film "a hit piece that misses" and "a psy op," mocking Gibney as a "bitter old man" as theaters emptied.
A normal studio response would be to write off the theatrical run and ship the file to streaming. Instead, Universal, which holds international rights, set a five-country rollout: the UK on January 15, Germany on January 21, Spain on February 5, France on February 17, Australia on February 25.
The map is the strategy
Look at where those dates land. Tesla's European sales have been in what Electrek calls a brutal decline with no bottom, roughly halving as Musk's politics turned the brand toxic — with Germany, where he endorsed the AfD, leading the collapse. Universal is not carpet-bombing the globe with this release; it's placing a four-hour anti-Musk epic, market by market, in the territories that have already voted on the subject with their wallets.
In America, Musk made $614 per screen. In Europe, Tesla sales roughly halved. Universal is reading the same two numbers.
This was not the path of least resistance. After the US flop there was industry buzz that Universal might quietly drop the film; the studio denied it, and separately told Deadline that claims of US theaters pulling the film under pressure from Musk were "just not true." Releasing it anyway, into markets where the subject is this unpopular, reads as a calculated bet that antipathy sells tickets that curiosity didn't.
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What could still go wrong
The honest caveat is that America's rejection wasn't purely ideological. World of Reel's Jordan Ruimy argues the runtime did the real damage — Musk fans won't pay for a hit piece, and his critics won't sit through four hours of him either, a math problem that doesn't change at customs. And the film's long-term home is murky: HBO pre-bought US streaming rights before David Ellison's family — which Ruimy notes is close to Musk — took over the company, and he already predicts a quiet burial there.
Which raises the stakes on the European experiment. If the film connects in Berlin and London the way it didn't in Burbank, Musk comes back across the Atlantic as a vindicated import with a news cycle attached. If it doesn't, Gibney will have made a movie about one of the most argued-about men alive that no country wanted to watch.
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