Sightlines · reception
How Better Man was received
2024 · Michael Gracey · Better Man on Sightlines
The arc
One of the most spectacular box-office bombs of its moment — a ~$100M biopic that barely grossed $20M because America had no idea who Robbie Williams was — yet critics loved it, and almost immediately the flop became the pitch: word-of-mouth turned 'the monkey movie' into a see-it-to-believe-it favorite.
What’s debated
The eternal debate: is rendering Robbie Williams as a CGI chimp a stroke of genius that saves the film from biopic mediocrity, or a gimmick propping up an otherwise formulaic rise-fall-redemption arc?
Its footprint
It lives in culture as 'the Robbie Williams monkey movie' — the CGI chimp became an instant meme — while the 'Rock DJ' one-take musical number down Regent Street gets shared and rewatched as one of the great modern movie musical sequences.
Where it stands
A fast-tracked cult object: Letterboxd's beloved underdog flop, routinely invoked as proof that the music biopic formula can be redeemed if you're willing to get weird.
Did you know? The chimp conceit came from Robbie Williams himself — Michael Gracey recorded hours of interviews in which Williams kept describing himself as a 'performing monkey,' so Gracey took him literally, with Wētā FX earning the film an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects.