Ridley Scott’s 'The Last of Us' Meets 'I Am Legend' Sci-Fi Movie Underwhelms at the Box Office

Published Aug 29, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT

Rohan Naahar is a News Writer for Collider. From Francois Ozon to David Fincher, he’ll watch anything once. He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.

Nine years after his last sci-fi movie, director Ridley Scott made a long-awaited return to the genre this week. His new movie opened to mediocre reviews, and this appears to have impacted its performance at the box office. The movie in question is headlined by Jacob Elordi, alongside **Josh Brolin **and Margaret Qualley. Scott, who emerged as one of the greatest directors of his generation in the 1970s, is still renowned for the classics Blade Runner and Alien. However, his 2017 sci-fi movie, Alien: Covenant, underperformed at the box office and divided audiences. It now holds a 65% critics’ score and a 55% audience score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. Scott has recently expressed an interest in returning to the franchise, following the success of Alien: Romulus, which was directed by Fede Álvarez.

His latest movie has received a lower score on Rotten Tomatoes than even the divisive Alien: Covenant. Also featuring Allison Janney and Guy Pearce, the movie now holds a 40% score on the aggregator, where the consensus describes it as “a derivative and drowsy tour through the post-apocalypse” whose “lush visuals can’t compensate for its listless narrative and underpowered pacing.” In her review, Collider’s Gabrielle Moss wrote that the movie “offers some thrilling moments, solid performances, and breathtakingly lush landscape cinematography, it never quite coheres into the statement about love in times of crisis that it aspires to be.”

Your answers point to the world your instincts were built for. This is the universe your temperament, your survival instincts, and your particular brand of stubbornness were made for.

You took the red pill a long time ago — probably before anyone offered it to you. You’re a systems thinker who can’t help but notice the seams in things.

The wasteland doesn’t reward the clever or the well-connected — it rewards those who are hard to kill and harder to break. That’s you.

You’d survive here because you know how to exist in moral grey areas without losing yourself completely.

Arrakis is the most hostile environment in the known universe — and you are precisely the kind of person it rewards.

The galaxy far, far away is vast, loud, and in a constant state of violent political upheaval — and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

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