The 2020 film The Rhythm Section missed its opportunity to become the perfect replacement for the Jason Bourne films. Starring Blake Lively, The Rhythm Section is a one-person army style revenge film about a woman named Stephanie Patrick who seeks to get revenge against the people who orchestrated a plane crash that killed her family. The Rhythm Section is directed by Reed Morano and features a leading cast including Lively, Richard Brake, Elly Curtis, David Duggan, Matilda Ziegler, and Bill O’Connell.
Despite its promising premise, The Rhythm Section went over very poorly in a number of ways. First, the film had poor critical reception, scoring a 28% Tomatometer among critics and a 44% among audiences. At the box office, the results looked even more grim. The Rhythm Section grossed just under $6 million worldwide. This paltry total did not even come close to making up for the film’s estimated $50 million budget. Had things worked out differently, The Rhythm Section could have provided a fitting replacement for another major revenge franchise.
While their plots are not identical, The Rhythm Section has seeds of overlap with the Bourne movies. Starring Matt Damon, The Bourne Identity, the first film in the Bourne series, sees a man named Jason Bourne in an action-packed race to avoid assassination. This plot setup gives The Bourne Identity a similar mystery intrigue to The Rhythm Section. Like the 2020 film, the Bourne movies can also be categorized in the one-person army subgenre, making their structures similar.
What’s more, both The Rhythm Section and the Bourne movies are based on novels. The original Bourne novels were written by Robert Ludlum, and feature the books The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Bourne Ultimatum, all of which were adapted for the screen. The character of Stephanie Patrick also stems from literature, debuting in the 1999 Mark Burnell novel The Rhythm Section and appearing throughout three additional novels.
Because of these similarities, it seems like The Rhythm Section missed the opportunity for Stephanie Patrick to become the new Jason Bourne. Like the Bourne movies, The Rhythm Section was not lacking in source material, as there were multiple novels on which the 2020 film could have found plot elements. Failing to make a strong adaptation, however, The Rhythm Section made it such that Stephanie Patrick will almost certainly be lost in cinema.
A likeness to the Bourne movies was not the only thing that The Rhythm Section had going for it. The film also shared some elements of the James Bond movies. The Rhythm Section producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson have both previously worked on Bond films. Broccoli has in fact been the owner of Eon productions, who owns the rights to the Bond films.
Broccoli has generally brought the Bond films success over her time at the franchise. During her tenure, acclaimed films like Skyfall and Spectre have been produced. One would think that, given the genre overlap, the addition of Wilson and Broccoli would have been a huge asset to The Rhythm Section. Much like their potential to create a Bourne-esque series, The Rhythm Section killed any chance it had at taking advantage of these potential assets.
Because The Rhythm Section is a 2020 release, one might at first think that its box office failure stemmed from it being put out during the pandemic. Even so, COVID can not be fairly attributed to its flop, because The Rhythm Section was released on January 31, 2020, before the pandemic shut down theaters. There are a number of reasons this may have happened, including box office competition with films such as Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker, 1917, Bad Boys for Life, and The Grudge.
Compared with The Bourne Identity’s $214 million franchise start, The Rhythm Section looks particularly lackluster. Lively not having the box office appeal or star power of Matt Damon could also be seen as a contributing factor in the movie not matching The Bourne Identity’s success. Lively’s highest-grossing film as a lead actress was the 2016 shark movie The Shallows. This $119.1 million total, which, while impressive, wouldn’t have been enough for The Rhythm Section even if it had equaled that number.
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The failure of the film also underscores a much wider dilemma facing movies of its kind. It highlights the general struggle for female-led action-crime films to succeed financially. 2017’s Atomic Blonde, for example, made $100 million at the box office on a $30 million budget. By comparison, The Bond film released two years prior, Spectre, received a $245 million budget and turned in $880.7 million at the global box office. Looking at these instances, it seems The Rhythm Section may have been another case of a female-led assassin film faring poorly.