To say that Abel Tesfaye — better known as The Weeknd — sang out of key in his latest acting outing is an understatement.
Hurry Up Tomorrow, a psychological thriller about a tormented pop star played by Tesfaye, debuted to a mere $3.3 million domestically from 2,020 theaters over the May 16-18 weekend to finish in sixth-place despite his status as one of music‘s best-selling superstars. Overseas, it likewise made roughly $3 million.
Heading into the weekend, the $15 million movie was tracking to open to $5 million to $9 million in North America. But withering reviews — its score on Rotten Tomatoes was 14 percent — combined with lethal word-of-mouth torpedoed the title, which was financed by Live Nation and distributed by Lionsgate as a companion piece to The Weeknd’s studio album of the same time.
Many times, a movie that’s been dissed by critics can still win over everyday moviegoers. Not in this case. Exit scores were just as dismal, including one-and-a-half-stars out of five on exit polling service Comscore PostTrak and (ouch) a “C-” on CinemaScore.
Even Rotten Tomatoes’ audience popcornmeter score is only 68 percent despite Tesfaye’s millions upon millions of fans who have followed his every victory — and there have been many — on the music side. They simply didn’t connect with the film, just as they didn’t with showrunner Sam Levinson’s controversial The Idol, which was canceled by HBO after one season. Tesfaye developed that project with Levinson and likewise played a musician, co-starring as a sketchy nightclub owner alongside Lily-Rose Depp.
“Hurry Up Tomorrow is not alone in being an original 2025 release that did not resonate with audiences. Joining Mickey 17, Last Breath, Novocaine and Black Bag, original films have generally had a very tough time connecting with audiences for whom if the concept or the marketing for whatever reason doesn’t strike a chord, makes it very difficult to make inroads at the box office,” says Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “Of course, Sinners was a very notable and obvious exception, but that film had the benefit of having Michael B. Jordan working again with Ryan Coogler plus stellar reviews across the board which made it immune to the original IP curse that’s befallen many a film this year.”
Many moviegoers are taking issue with Hurry Up Tomorrow for being little more than a feature-length promotion for Tesfaye’s studio album of the same name, which was released in January amid the tragic L.A. fires and is billed as a goodbye to his moniker as The Weeknd.
“The amorphous narrative, which frequently veers into surrealism and suffers from a severe case of symbolism, mainly concerns the existential angst being suffered by its star, reeling from a recent break-up with a girlfriend (voiced by Riley Keough),” wrote THR critic Frank Scheck.
In terms of demos, Caucasians made up 39 percent of moviegoers, followed by Latinos (38 percent), Black moviegoers (12 percent), Asians (8 percent) and Native American/Other (5 percent).
Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan also star in Hurry Up Tomorrow, which was directed by Trey Edward Shults by a script he co-wrote with Tesfaye and Reza Fayhim that sees Tesfaye play a fictionalized version of himself, or rather, a musician on the verge of a nervous breakdown after a breakup and nearly losing his voice (a storyline inspired by real-life events).
Lionsgate and the other partners involved say Hurry Up offered a unique opportunity to intersect the worlds of movies and music. In distributing the film, Lionsgate worked closely with The Weeknd’s partners at Republic Records, as well as his XO label, Manic Phase Productions, Live Nation and CAA, just to name a few key players bridging the film and the teams and connecting fans from his “After Hours Til Dawn” Tour.
As Scheck notes in his review, after Hurry Up Tomorrow and HBO’s short-lived The Idol, some career counseling might be in order for Tesfaye.
