History Repeats Itself with The Life of Chuck at the Box Office

Shazam should be allowed in movie theatres. Don’t get me wrong, I hate when people pull out their phones and scroll during a movie, but I think some allowances should be made for a brief Shazam check every now and then. It would especially be useful at film festivals. Many film festival movies lack metadata on sites like IMDb. That metadata may not populate for over a year after the festival premiere. Distribution can take a long time.

I had a chance to see The Life of Chuck at the 2024 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival. An absolute banger of a song plays twice in the movie- once on Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor)’s car radio, and once at the middle school dance. After TIFF, I searched the film on IMDb to see if I could find a soundtrack list. The Life of Chuck did have an IMDb page at the time, but no soundtrack list. I figured I would have to wait for the film’s wide release to find the name of the song. It felt safe to assume the movie would go wide later that year. It had won the People’s Choice Award at TIFF. Those movies almost always get nominated for Oscars. Any distributor would likely be eager to add the film to its fall release lineup. Maybe it would play well over the holiday season.

In the weeks after TIFF, Neon acquired The Life of Chuck for a theatrical release in June 2025. What? I have to wait 9 months to find out the name of that great song? The song is “Gimme Some Lovin’” by Spencer Davis Group, by the way. It’s a song worth the wait.

The Life of Chuck did not thrive at the June box office. As of this writing, it’s lost most of its North American screens a month after its release date. Maybe it would have done better over awards season if it could slap “Academy Award nominee” on its promotional materials. Still, despite being a TIFF People’s Choice winner, there’s no guarantee it would have been nominated for Oscars.

I love this movie. I also love the Stephen King novella it’s based on. Watching the trailers Neon released for the movie, I think they could have picked a different angle to better promote the film.

The film opens in an apocalyptic setting: California is under water, bees are extinct, and the solar day has extended by about five minutes. Maybe it’s climate change. Maybe something knocked the Earth off its axis. Schoolteacher Marty Anderson doesn’t know. He also doesn’t know what’s up with the billboards, graffiti, and skywriting with the phrase 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!, but he does figure it’s the end. He reconnects with his ex-wife as the world goes dark.

The movie flashes back, before the apocalypse, to a sunny day on a New England promenade. Accountant Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) stops to dance to a busk drummer’s beat. He deals with recurring headaches. He later learns that he has terminal brain cancer.

The audience wonders how the apocalypse and the promenade busk drummer are connected. The pieces come together in the movie’s third act. The apocalypse is Chuck’s mind dying. His mind contains its own world. All of our minds do. Chuck met Marty Anderson at his middle school. That interaction created an imprint of Marty that lived in Chuck’s mind until Chuck’s premature death at 39 years old. From the perspective of the Marty Anderson we meet in Act I, he is living in a simulation. That simulation collapses when Chuck dies.

This idea of living in a simulation has been explored in science fiction for a long time. The Matrix is likely the most famous movie that explores this idea. Rick and Morty had an episode on it in Season 2. The Life of Chuck offers a humanist twist on it.

The Life of Chuck is not, strictly speaking, a genre film, but it has a genre sensibility. The marketing should have played on that.

The trailers for The Life of Chuck present it as a heartwarming flick. They pull on quotes from critics. I read a lot of these quotes on Rotten Tomatoes after I first saw the film in September 2024. They play up the story as being “from the author of The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me, and The Green Mile.” That author is, of course, Stephen King. Another critic calls the movie “It’s A Wonderful Life for our time.”

It’s A Wonderful Life is, of course, Frank Capra’s 1946 not-a-Christmas-movie that became a Christmas movie later on (more on that later). The film existed, for me, as a series of clips for the longest time. It plays on TV at Christmastime. I catch clips of it here and there every year. I only watched it all the way through for the first time last year.

The Life of Chuck trailer features clips from the film where characters talk, laugh, and smile knowingly at each other. That’s it. There is no Tom Hiddleston dancing, no middle school dance sequence, no sinkhole on the freeway during the apocalypse. Viewers see the ensemble cast, actors of different ages and genders, but no plot points. It’s hard to sell a movie based on a cast these days, even if said cast is stuffed with folks from Marvel and Star Wars movies.

In other words, the marketing for The Life of Chuck made it look like a saccharine drama to catch on streaming.

Stephen King is his own Intellectual Property (IP). He is the King of Horror. We live in a time where movies based on IP tend to do better at the box office when compared to original films. That’s why even great ensembles can’t sell movies. It: Chapter One (2017), based on Stephen King’s novel, is the highest-grossing horror film of all time. People recognized King’s killer clown Pennywise and came out for the movie in droves.

Although he is the King of Horror, Stephen King is also the mastermind behind movies like The Shawshank Redemption. That is the highest-rated movie on IMDb, but as a culture, we don’t always immediately associate it with Stephen King. We think of Morgan Freeman’s narration.

The Life of Chuck is not an overt horror like It, Carrie, or Salem’s Lot, but it has horror-adjacent elements, including the haunted cupola in the Victorian house that Chuck Krantz grew up in. The apocalyptic world present in the first act is scary (though maybe not in the traditional “horror” sense), and it appeals to science fiction fans. The marketing for The Life of Chuck should have played it up. It would lure Stephen King’s core audience in. It would also help the film’s emotional payoff. Imagine thinking you’re sitting down to watch a sci-fi Stephen King adaptation and getting hit with emotional gut punches like “I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.”

The Life of Chuck is a difficult movie to market. It bends genres within a non-traditional story framework. Audiences don’t really know what’s going on until the end. Even then, it might have to sit with you. Neon’s marketing strategy seemed to be to remind viewers of related films.

While The Shawshank Redemption, Stand by Me, and The Green Mile are all very different movies, they all pull from the same side of Stephen King- his more humanistic side. I’d argue that side is present in much of King’s horror output as well, but I digress. It’s A Wonderful Life is, of course, a very humanistic movie as well. All four of these movies are beloved. They are not, however, the sorts of movies that people turn up for in theatres. They never were.

Yes, dramas, comedies, and movies for adults in general tend to struggle at the box office these days. Blame streaming; blame the economy; blame too many ads before the movie starts, but it’s not a new phenomenon.

When It’s A Wonderful Life first released in December 1946, it grossed just $3.3 million at the box office against a $3.7 million budget. It lost at both the box office and the Oscars to war drama The Best Years of Our Lives.

Nearly fifty years later, The Shawshank Redemption saw mediocre box office results as well. That was a competitive year for movies. When Shawshank released on October 14, 1994, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, and Jurassic Park were playing in theatres. Pulp Fiction released the same day. Jurassic released a year earlier, but its popularity endured.

Both It’s A Wonderful Life and The Shawshank Redemption gained popularity long after their time at the box office. Both movies owe their second acts to television.

In 1974, the copyright holder for It’s A Wonderful Life forgot to renew the copyright. Television stations across the United States picked up on this and, at Christmastime, began to air the movie. They didn’t have to pay to license it. Audiences watched the film at home. It became a holiday classic. Due to paperwork. The copyright was restored to Republic Pictures in 1993. I’ve heard people older than me describe It’s A Wonderful Life as the movie you put on in the background while you did Christmas baking in the 70s and 80s. A couple decades later, The Shawshank Redemption found audiences by playing on the television channel Turner Classic Movies.

Neon tried to get people to see The Life of Chuck in theatres by comparing it to movies that did not do well in theatres. There is a silver lining, I think. If The Life of Chuck follows in the footsteps of its spiritual successor, It’s A Wonderful Life, it may gain popularity on streaming. It may become a classic in the decades to come. I can picture myself, twenty years from now, popping on The Life of Chuck to play in the background while I make dinner. I picture standing at the counter, swaying my hips and tapping my foot while “Gimme Some Lovin’” plays at Chuck’s middle school dance.

Sources:

Frost, C. (2024, November 24). Tim Robbins Credits One Man For “The Shawshank Redemption” Finding Its Audience. Deadline. https://deadline.com/2024/11/tim-robbins-the-shawshank-redemption-ted-turner-movies-channel-1236186382/

Serafino, J. (2024, December 6). How ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ Went From Box Office Dud to Accidental Christmas Tradition. Mental Floss. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/90135/how-its-wonderful-life-went-box-office-dud-accidental-christmas-tradition