Alex Gibney's documentary Musk has ended its theatrical run after two weeks, according to entertainment news site Showbiz411, and it is now streaming on Prime Video and Fandango.
The film opened October 9 in four theaters in two cities. By its second and final week it was in more than 450. Gizmodo put the total take at $571,902 and called the film "an unmitigated flop." Divided across 450 theaters, that works out to under $1,300 apiece, but treat that as a rough average, since the first week ran in only four.
The release came wrapped in friction. Before it opened, Elon Musk called Gibney a "horrible human" and dismissed the film as an assembly of people with "an axe to grind." His attorney, Alex Spiro, sent the production team a letter putting them "on formal legal notice." TikTok disabled the film's advertising account, allegedly over "political content," then restored access 48 hours later. On Reddit, users speculated about abrupt screening cancellations.
Those pieces are worth keeping separate, because nothing here links them to the box office. The Reddit comments are speculation, and the TikTok block was reversed within two days. Documentaries about public figures also tend to draw smaller crowds than studio releases, so a modest gross needs no outside explanation.
Still, the pattern is unusual for Gibney. His earlier films include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room in 2005, about one of the largest corporate fraud cases in American history, and Citizen K in 2019, on the alliance between Vladimir Putin and a Russian expat billionaire. This time the subject answered publicly, and with a legal letter, before the film reached a screen.
The theatrical numbers cannot settle the question. A two-week run measures how many theaters booked the film as much as how many people wanted to see it.