Four critics, four verdicts: what $110 million actually bought
Ridley Scott’s postapocalyptic drama split critics from “misfire” to “his best since The Martian” — the budget explains why.
By The Weekend · · 5 min read
Disney spent $110 million on "The Dog Stars," Ridley Scott's adaptation of Peter Heller's 2012 novel, then released it the last weekend of August — the same slot that recently swallowed a "War of the Roses" remake and a Ronald Reagan biopic. Four major reviews landed within a day of each other, and they don't agree on whether the film is a misfire or Scott's best work in eleven years. That gap is the story.
A release date is a verdict, delivered before anyone's seen the film
"The Dog Stars" was originally scheduled for late March 2026. It got pulled and rescheduled for August 28 — the specific week distributors use for titles they've stopped believing in. The Hollywood Reporter's review states the mechanics plainly: a pushed-back date, minimal advance press with the cast, no U.S. red carpet, and a trailer cut to resemble a dozen other post-apocalyptic thrillers already crowded out by television. That's not marketing neglect. That's a studio's internal read on a film's commercial ceiling, made visible months before critics filed a word.
The film cost $110 million to make. Jacob Elordi, fresh off an Oscar-nominated turn, leads a cast that includes Josh Brolin, Guy Pearce, Margaret Qualley, Allison Janney and Benedict Wong — enough combined prestige that the Guardian's review calls the whole project "a shiny treasure poking out through the dusty mass" of the late-August dump. Disney built something expensive and cast it well, then treated it like a write-off. Both things are true, and the reviews split almost exactly along that fault line: critics who focus on the film's restraint call it deliberate; critics who wanted spectacle for the budget call it inert.
Set in 2035, ten years after a flu pandemic, in a genre that's already full
The story follows Hig (Elordi), a mechanic-turned-pilot who lost his pregnant wife to an influenza pandemic that wiped out most of the population roughly a decade before the film's timeline. He shares a converted airstrip hangar in Erie, Colorado, with Bangley (Brolin), a former Army Aviation veteran who never learned to fly and distrusts what's left of humanity. Hig makes reconnaissance runs in a Cessna, drops medical supplies to a Mennonite community led by Aaron (Wong), and eventually meets a father-daughter pair, Pops (Pearce) and Cima (Qualley), whose farmhouse becomes the film's second half.
The postapocalyptic survival genre isn't short of supply. Deadline and IndieWire both invoke "The Walking Dead" — now on its seventh spinoff — and "The Last of Us" as the shows this film has to clear, and Deadline's review notes the "Reapers," the film's antagonist tribe, land closer to gang violence than the zombie tradition the genre usually leans on. The Hollywood Reporter frames the film instead as a Western with survivalist trappings — closer to Paul Greengrass's "News of the World" than to "The Walking Dead" — which is a generous read of the same pacing that IndieWire calls "bizarrely inert."
The $110 million question nobody answers on screen
Here's the detail that ties the four reviews together more than any of them says outright: nobody can account for where the budget went. The Guardian writes it flatly — "where the $110m budget went is a mystery" — pointing out that the action sequences, when they arrive, are "cut-and-paste." Deadline and Hollywood Reporter both single out one setpiece, a Cessna takeoff under attack, as the film's standout, but that's one sequence carrying the weight of a nine-figure budget. Most of the film's Colorado landscapes were shot in Italy's Abruzzo, Lazio and Alpine foothills — cinematography, not combat, appears to be where the money is visible on screen.
That's a real tension for a studio betting on a director whose reputation runs on scale. Scott is 88 and still known for staging spectacle; three of the four reviews note that this film deliberately withholds it, saving action for late in the runtime in favor of character studies between Hig and Bangley. Hollywood Reporter treats that as a mature choice; the Guardian treats it as a script — from Mark L. Smith, who also wrote "The Revenant" and "Twisters" — that "asks very little and gives even less as reward." Both critics watched the same restraint. One called it grace. One called it a shrug.
The performance the reviews can't agree on is the same performance
Elordi is the hinge every review turns on, and the split there is the sharpest of the four. Deadline calls him "the real star" of the film, showing "genuine chops as a leading man." Hollywood Reporter compares his screen presence to "the heyday of Kevin Costner." The Guardian, describing the identical stoic, quiet performance, calls it "boringly absent" — "empty, stoic stares" from an actor it says seems "as fatigued by playing Hig as we are watching him." Nobody disputes what Elordi is doing on screen. The disagreement is entirely about whether restraint reads as depth or absence, which is really a disagreement about what a $110 million survival drama owes its audience — and that's a critical judgment, not a factual one.
The open question a release date can't settle
Disney's scheduling suggests the studio expects a modest opening and is betting on the film finding an audience later — through word of mouth, streaming, or the "more mature audiences" Hollywood Reporter says it's built for rather than "short-attention-span consumers of brawny action." Whether that audience exists in numbers large enough to justify the budget is the question a late-August dump date is designed to avoid answering quickly. Box-office receipts over its first few weekends, not the review cluster, will be the real verdict — and given the split among critics who've already seen it, that number is genuinely uncertain rather than a formality.
What the four reviews actually disagree about
Not the plot, the cast or the setting — all four sources describe the same story beats. The disagreement is entirely about pacing and reward: whether a slow, character-first survival film justifies its scale, and whether Elordi's minimalism is a performance or an absence of one.
Is "The Dog Stars" based on a true story or an existing book
It's an adaptation of Peter Heller's 2012 novel of the same name, adapted for the screen by Mark L. Smith.