‘s hits theaters on Aug. 9, but the review embargo for the film broke on Thursday, and the early reaction from critics has been dire. A live-action adaptation of Gearbox Software’s popular video game series, ‘s film takes place on the planet Pandora and tells the story of a band of outlaw misfits.
The film stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt and Jamie Lee Curtis, with Jack Black providing the voice of a wisecracking robot. As of Thursday evening, the review aggregator sites have damning scores for . On Rotten Tomatoes, the film’s score clocked in at a lowly 6 percent from 45 reviews.
Mercifully, the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is markedly higher at 51 percent so far. On Metacritic, the critic score was 29 based on 23 reviews and things were no better on Letterboxd, where users gave a score of 2.1/5.
Below are key excerpts from some of the most prominent early reviews. David Rooney writes that “the big mystery [with ] is how such a noisy nothing of a movie landed the stacked cast.” David zeroes in on what went wrong with the film, highlighting big changes during the production.
“To be fair, the project for which Blanchett and other major names signed on possibly looked a little different given the number of screenwriting hands it passed through. The most notable of those belonged to Craig Mazin, a co-creator and co-writer of , who reportedly chose to remove his name from the project. The script credit ultimately went to Roth and first-timer .