There’s a scene in Eddington that sums up the entire experience of watching it: a small-town sheriff, drowning in his own paranoia, stares into a phone screen while his world burns down around him. Depending on who you ask, that scene is either the most honest thing American cinema has produced about the COVID era — or a two-hour panic attack disguised as a Western.
Nobody walked out of Eddington neutral. That was always the point.
The Pitch Nobody Else Would Touch
Written and directed by Ari Aster — the mind behind Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid — Eddington does something almost no studio wanted near it in 2025: it drags the audience back to the summer of 2020. Lockdowns. Mask mandates. The George Floyd protests. Online conspiracy spirals. All of it, compressed into a fictional New Mexico town where a sheriff and a mayor go to war over how the town should handle the pandemic.
Joaquin Phoenix plays that sheriff, Joe Cross. Pedro Pascal plays the mayor, Ted Garcia. And around them, Aster built one of the most stacked ensembles of the year — Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward — all willing to step into a story most financiers would have run from.
<cite index=”2-1″>At the film’s Cannes press conference, the cast was reportedly asked whether they had concerns about reentering the U.S. after making a movie with such politically charged subject matter — and Pascal responded that fear was “the way that they win,” urging people to keep telling stories and not let anyone scare them out of it.</cite>
That’s not typical junket small talk. That’s a cast bracing for impact.
Cannes Loved It. The Box Office Didn’t.
Eddington premiered in the main competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival before A24 released it in theaters that July. Critically, it landed somewhere most Aster films do: polarizing but respected, currently sitting around a 68% critics score. Commercially, it was a different story — the film grossed roughly $13.7 million worldwide, a box office bomb by any studio math, despite the star power attached to it.
That gap — critical intrigue paired with audience indifference at the theater — is exactly what fuels the “did Hollywood bury this?” narrative. The truth is messier than a conspiracy. A24 didn’t quietly shelve it; it got a wide theatrical push and a real Cannes competition slot, which is about as far from “buried” as a film can get. What actually happened looks more like audience fatigue: in 2025, most people weren’t ready to relive 2020 for entertainment, no matter who was starring in it.
The Afterlife Nobody Predicted
Here’s the twist: Eddington didn’t die at the box office. It found its real audience later. <cite index=”5-1,5-2″>By November 2025, the film had surged into HBO Max’s top ten most-watched movies, drawing renewed attention for its political commentary and dark comedic timing.</cite>
That’s the pattern with films like this — the ones too uncomfortable for a Friday night at the multiplex but perfectly suited to a quiet, late-night stream where you can sit with how it makes you feel. Eddington didn’t need a crowd. It needed time.
Why the Controversy Was the Whole Point
Aster has never made comfortable films, but Eddington hit differently because it wasn’t hiding behind metaphor. Hereditary used grief and cult horror as a shield. Eddington just pointed the camera at recent history and dared people to admit they still don’t agree on what happened.
That’s the real reason it split rooms in half. It wasn’t asking “was the pandemic scary” — everyone already agrees on that. It was asking who you trusted, who you blamed, and whether the mask on your face said more about your politics than your health. Five years later, those questions still don’t have clean answers, and Eddington refused to hand you one.
The Bigger Story
Joaquin Phoenix didn’t need this film. He already has an Oscar. He could have taken the safe franchise paycheck or the awards-season prestige drama with zero risk attached. Instead, he backed a movie that guaranteed him headlines about being “polarizing” instead of “powerful.”
That’s the part of this story that gets lost in the box office numbers: an actor at the peak of his career choosing discomfort on purpose. Whether or not Eddington was actually buried by Hollywood, one thing’s clear — Phoenix bet on a film that made people argue, and in an industry obsessed with consensus, that’s still the rarest thing an A-lister can do.
Eddington is streaming now, for anyone finally ready to watch 2020 happen to them all over again.