Ridley Scott’s ‘The Dog Stars’ Rotten Tomatoes Score Keeps Sliding Right Before Release

Ridley Scott is returning to theaters this week with ‘The Dog Stars,’ a post apocalyptic survival drama that marks his first foray back into the genre since ‘The Martian.’ The story follows Hig, played by Jacob Elordi, and Josh Brolin’s Bangley as two of the few survivors left after an influenza pandemic wipes out most of humanity. The film also stars Margaret Qualley, Allison Janney, Guy Pearce and Benedict Wong.

The film held its world premiere in London on August 20, followed by a series of press screenings hosted by 20th Century Studios, with early social media reactions arriving mixed before full reviews were allowed to publish. That embargo lifted just days ago, and the fallout has been rough for the legendary director. Buzz around ‘The Dog Stars’ shifted quickly from cautious optimism to genuine concern.

As of this week, the film’s Tomatometer score sits at 39 percent based on 56 reviews, with the Popcornmeter still pending as audience scores have not yet been tallied. That number has been anything but stable. Early reviews had the film sitting at just 30 percent out of the first ten counted, before it climbed to 42 percent once more critics weighed in, a number that would rank among the ten worst reviewed films of Scott’s entire career if it held.

The swings have not stopped there. At one point the score dropped to a debut of 44 percent, marking the director’s lowest rated project of the 2020s, while it has also been tracked at 42 percent, putting it just above ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ at 39 percent as Scott’s second lowest score as a director on the aggregator. The number could still shift further as additional reviews roll in.

Scott has not been shy about his own confidence heading into release. He recently described himself in an interview not as a filmmaker but as an influencer, and in that same conversation with Variety, he made clear he took on ‘The Dog Stars’ because he was tired of Hollywood’s current obsession with familiar crime and superhero formulas. He had also floated that this new film might be his best work since ‘The Martian,’ a claim critics have not exactly rushed to confirm.

The screenplay comes from Mark L. Smith, adapting Peter Heller’s 2012 novel of the same name, and 20th Century Studios describes the film as a riveting thriller set in a world where survival is instinct but humanity is a choice. Critics have generally found the film gorgeous to look at but frustratingly unsure of what it wants to be, caught somewhere between a slow character study and a full blown action thriller.

‘The Dog Stars’ opens in theaters on August 28. With the Tomatometer still moving and the Popcornmeter yet to weigh in, is this apocalypse actually worth the trip to IMAX, or is Ridley Scott’s confidence about to run into a wall of audience skepticism once opening weekend numbers land?