Ambulance Is Bay’s Best Movie In 9 Years — Why Is Its Box Office So Bad?

Ambulance is director Michael Bay’s best movie since 2013’s -so why isn’t the action thriller performing well at the box office? A funny thing happened to legendary action director Michael Bay over the past two decades. When Bay first came to prominence as a helmer, his work received mixed reviews, as critics dubbed and Armageddon mindless guilty pleasures, while criticizing Pearl Harbor for being overlong and melodramatic.

However, the 00s saw Bay’s critical reception shift as his movies grew progressively more popular with audiences and his style grew more distinctive. By the late 00s, even casual movie fans were familiar with “Bayhem,” Michael Bay’s unique brand of high-octane action sequences. Hits like and Transformers cemented Bay’s status as the reigning king of the big budget action genre but, while the likes of and Robot Chicken affectionately spoofed this phenomenon, Bay’s box office success never translated to much in the way of mainstream critical approval.

Related: Ambulance Ending Explained (In Detail)

That changed in 2013 when Bay released the smaller crime thriller Pain & Gain. A surreal, offbeat true-crime story, Pain & Gain saw Bay bring his high-tech pyrotechnics to a more intimate brand of action movie and the results were praised by many critics (although some reviewers still found the movie’s brash, in-your-face style obnoxious). Now, 2022’s Ambulance sees Candyman reboot star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jake Gyllenhall star in another Bay effort that has earned critical acclaim, but this action thriller’s box office reception has been comparatively terrible. Ambulance is the best use of Bay’s unique skill set since Pain & Gain-and arguably even since Transformers- which leads viewers to reasonably wonder why the movie’s box office performance fails to reflect this.

Ambulance Is Michael Bay’s Best Movie Since Pain & Gain

Although the two movies are very different in tone, Ambulance is comfortably Bay’s best movie since Pain & Gain. The later Transformers movies were a touch too silly for their own good and suffered without Shia LaBoeuf’s central performance to ground them, while proved that a pre- Tom Clancy John Krasinski was not ready to headline an earnest, self-serious war drama. Where Pain & Gain succeeded was in taking Bay’s appetite for destruction to a more intimate, small-scale story, something that Ambulance pulls off even more impressively. The simple setup-two desperate brothers rob a bank and commandeer the eponymous emergency vehicle as a getaway car, taking a nurse hostage in the process-allows Bay to play into his strengths. The ambulances are used as battering rams, murder weapons, and, at one point, as a giant bomb during the action of Ambulance, but the story’s compressed runtime and its broad, archetypical characters ensure Ambulance ‘s absurd action never feels pointless or contrived.

Ambulance’s Box Office: How Much Michael Bay’s Movie Has Made

While Ambulance was not an expensive action movie, it wasn’t particularly cheap either. Pain & Gain’s budget was a mere $22 million (for a frame of reference, the teen horror sequel Scream 2022 cost the same). In contrast, Ambulance cost around $40 million, a fraction of what a Transformers movie budget would be, but still double the budget of a small-scale indie project. Bay was attracted to shooting the movie because he wanted a smaller project, and a Variety article before Ambulance’s release noted that its low budget should cushion the blow of any potential box office underperformance. However, the trade publication may not have realized just how much Ambulance would end up falling short of Bay’s normal box office performance.

Why Ambulance’s Box Office Is So Low

Ambulance earned $9 million in its opening weekend, finishing fifth at the box office. The fact that Ambulance was marketed squarely at older male movie fans looking for a throwback to the era of mid-budget Shane Black action movies like Lethal Weapon was blamed by some publications such as Deadline Hollywood. The reasoning was that older movie fans are less likely to return to theaters and it is a hard charge to dismiss, particularly when half of Ambulance’s opening weekend ticket sales were to patrons over 35. However, this isn’t the whole picture. There’s also the issue of Ambulance’s R-rating, which precludes younger audiences from checking out the action release, and a cast comprised mainly of older actors famous for family-unfriendly fare like , Baby Driver, , and.

Related: Why Reviews For Michael Bay’s Ambulance Are So Divided

While Jake Gyllenhall did crop up in one MCU outing, it wasn’t in the lead role, and he is as famous for his darker projects like , , Nightcrawler, and the Ryan Reynolds horror movie Life. Speaking of the MCU, the fact that more and more superhero movies are filling multiplexes could also be to blame for Ambulance ‘s underperformance, as the MCU and DC’s offerings increasingly represent the majority of Hollywood’s action genre output. Even if there are non-superhero action movies still being released, the majority of big-budget blockbuster megahits are entries into the superhero sub-genre, and Bay’s history as a hitmaker in this field means his time might be coming to an end unless he can join the MCU’s stable of directors.

Is There Still A Movie Audience For Michael Bay’s “Bayhem”?

The Transformers movies were tremendously successful, but they were also part of an existing franchise with a built-in audience before Bay came along. In contrast, the rest of Bay’s oeuvre doesn’t paint a picture of a reliable blockbuster action director like The Terminator creator James Cameron. 13 Hours fared passably in the US but did weak business elsewhere, Pain & Gain was seen as a success mostly due to its low budget, 2005’s The Island was both a critical and commercial flop, and now Ambulance has failed to turn good reviews into solid box office. This is far cry from Bay’s run of hits in the 90s and early 00s, and can be attributed in part to a shift in what audiences want to watch and where they want to watch it. Streaming services like Netflix have become home to many smaller action successes such as the sleeper hit Below Zeroor Bay’s own 6 Underground.

However, there is also another issue at play here. Ambulance is a critical success precisely because the movie serves up classic Bayhem, an explosion-heavy, action-forward style of blockbuster filmmaking whose time might simply be up. Action cinema has moved into a more self-referential, fantasy and sci-fi adjacent place in recent years, with the MCU and its clones packing out the multiplex with superheroes who know the tropes of their own slick, CGI-heavy movies. A gritty, franchise-less standalone thriller like Ambulance was always going to struggle to find an audience in 2022, even with Michael Bay ‘s name attached to the production.

More: How Ambulance’s Rotten Tomatoes Score Compares to Michael Bay’s Other Movies

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Originally published at https://screenrant.com on April 12, 2022.