Ridley Scott’s post-apocalyptic drama The Dog Stars opens into the most crowded box office weekend of the summer.
Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars hits theaters August 28, and it’s arriving with a question attached that no amount of star power can fully answer in advance: is Jacob Elordi a leading man audiences will actually pay to see alone, or a scene-stealer who’s always worked best alongside someone bigger?
What The Dog Stars Is About
Adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, the film is set in a Colorado ravaged by a superflu that’s wiped out most of humanity. Elordi plays Hig, a civilian pilot who lost his wife to the virus and now spends his days patrolling the skies in an old Cessna alongside Bangley (Josh Brolin), a hardened ex-Marine he’s built an uneasy alliance with. When a mysterious radio transmission suggests someone else might still be out there, Hig sets off to find it – pulling Margaret Qualley’s character into his orbit along the way.
Guy Pearce, Benedict Wong, and Allison Janney round out the cast. Early reviews describe it less as an action spectacle than a “melancholic, character-driven Western,” with critics singling out Elordi’s quiet, Costner-esque screen presence as the film’s clearest asset, even as the film’s Rotten Tomatoes score has landed in mixed territory around 36%, a soft opening note for a movie carrying a reported $110 million budget.
The Box Office Gauntlet It’s Walking Into
The Dog Stars couldn’t have picked a tougher weekend to open. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is still the top film in the country in its fifth weekend, closing in on $900 million domestically. The Odyssey is in its seventh weekend and has already passed Deadpool & Wolverine to become the highest-grossing R-rated film ever. The End of Oak Street is still holding a chunk of the marketplace too. On top of all that, The Dog Stars isn’t even the only new adult-skewing release this weekend, it’s opening alongside Coyote vs. Acme, which tracking currently has matching or beating it.
The numbers tell the story. Two weeks ago, Box Office Pro projected an $18–23 million domestic opening for The Dog Stars. As of this week, that forecast has slid to somewhere between $10 million and $14 million, with at least one tracking service putting the range as low as $6.5–10.5 million. Globally, Disney is hoping for something closer to $25–30 million. Against a $110 million budget and Ridley Scott’s track record of needing real scale to turn a profit, that’s a rough setup though a strong Cessna-and-devastation trailer, awards-season buzz around its star, and a complete lack of similar counterprogramming this late in August could still help it find a lane.
Why Elordi Is the Real Story Here
Whatever The Dog Stars does at the box office, it’s arriving at the best moment of Jacob Elordi’s career. 2026 alone has given him his first Oscar nomination (Best Supporting Actor, for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein), a Critics Choice win, a return to Euphoria as Nate Jacobs, and Wuthering Heights a film that, despite mixed reviews, gave Elordi the biggest opening weekend of his career at $82 million worldwide and a $242 million final global gross.
What’s different about The Dog Stars is that, for the first time, Elordi is the one actually carrying a movie – not sharing top billing with Margot Robbie, not playing a supporting monster behind del Toro’s prosthetics, not one ensemble piece among many. From teen heartthrob in The Kissing Booth to Oscar-nominated character actor in the span of eight years, Elordi has built exactly the kind of quiet, brooding-leading-man appeal this role calls for. The Dog Stars won’t need to break box office records to prove something real: whether that appeal is enough, on its own, to open a movie.
So, it will be quite interesting to see how Jacob Elordi’s new movie The Dog Stars performs at the box office, especially with two major heavyweights, The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, standing like mountains in its way. But regardless of how things turn out, audiences are going to have plenty of options to choose from, ensuring that there will be no shortage of entertainment for moviegoers.
