Entertainment

Ridley Scott's Historical Epic Masterpiece That Bombed At The Box Office Is Officially Streaming For Free

Nairavoice · Nov 3, 2026 · 7 min read

Ridley Scott‘s under-the-radar 2021 historical epic tells a fantastic story with a unique structure, and is now available on Tubi. In recent years, several of Ridley Scott’s best movies have failed to connect at the box office, despite the fact that many of them are still quite strong. This 2021 feature is among the best of his entire career.

Granted, that’s saying quite a bit. The director has made some of the greatest films of all time with Alien, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, and Blade Runner, just to name a few. Underrated classics like Matchstick Men are also common fixtures in his nearly 50 years in the industry, making his career one of the best of all time.

The director is keeping busy, as Ridley Scott has many planned upcoming projects, including a new Alien film that will follow the events of Alien: Covenant. Combined with Prometheus, the director’s later sequels to the popular franchise provided incredible cerebral content in addition to wonderful science fiction action and thrills.

With all of that in mind, there is something incredibly special about one of the director’s two films released in 2021. And while House of Gucci might have been the highest-grossing movie that Scott released that year, his other film, a medieval epic with some of the best actors alive, deserves to be seen a great deal more.

Ridley Scott Borrows From A Kurosawa Masterpiece In The Last Duel

The Last Duel, Ridley Scott’s best movie in years, is now streaming on Tubi, and much of the film’s success comes from its leaning on an effect popularized by the 1950 Japanese film Rashomon. That Akira Kurosawa movie is among the best of the esteemed filmmaker’s career and created a whole sub-genre of films that use the Rashomon effect.

This refers to the telling of a story multiple times, each instance from a different perspective. In doing this, films like Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, and even the animated Red Riding Hood story Hoodwinked have crafted complex narratives that change multiple times throughout a single viewing.

This fantastic device is a clever way to build and then subvert expectations of characters and their intentions, and is used marvelously in The Last Duel. The story, which tells of an accusation of sexual assault and the duel between two men that follows, is framed multiple times through its great performances.

Matt Damon’s Jean de Carrouges tells his story, followed by his friend turned enemy, Adam Driver’s Jacques Le Gris. The film ends with a fantastic grounding by Jodie Comer’s Marguerite, Carrouges’ wife, who provides what seems to be the truest and darkest account of the narrative, giving it a bittersweet finish.

The Last Duel Is One Of Ridley Scott’s Best Historical Epics & Proves He’s Still A Master

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The Last Duel‘s fantastic and complex narrative does a great job of reasserting Scott’s place as one of the best filmmakers working in the past decade. While films like The Dog Stars and Napoleon have failed to connect narratively, The Last Duel makes it clear that Scott’s impeccable craft is far from gone.

The film’s world is enormous, the characters are incredibly strong, the script is superlative, and the performances are emotional and complex. Few filmmakers can build epics with the same ability and on the same scale as Scott, who previously directed memorable films including Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven.

What makes The Last Duel especially strong, however, is its excellent script. The film is based on a book by Eric Jager, and the non-fiction work was adapted by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Nicole Holofcener. This marked the second time Affleck and Damon worked on a script together, following their Academy Award-winning work on Good Will Hunting.

While The Last Duel did not connect at the box office, it remains a strong entry in Scott’s cinematic canon.

Telling a sharp and thoughtful story with great stakes and real-life characters, Scott does an excellent job of building up his period setting and filling it with great texture, allowing the fantastic titular duel at the end of the film to hit that much harder.

The Last Duel Deserved Way Better (& Why It Flopped)

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Regardless of being generally quite well received, scoring 85% with critics and 81% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, it cannot be denied that The Last Duel was a huge disappointment. The film only earned $30 million globally against a reported budget of $100 million, making it one of the year’s biggest flops.

There are many reasons why the movie underperformed. The first was that it was released during an important moment in the COVID-19 pandemic where, despite theaters being open, audiences had not yet turned out in full force. Summer 2021 films generally performed under expectations, especially considering the accessibility of streaming.

Still, it cannot be denied that some films still reaped decent grosses during this period. F9: The Fast Saga earned $726 million globally the preceding summer, and Spider-Man: No Way Home would earn $1.91 billion only two months later. With this in mind, the film’s underperformance is a more complex event.

Ridley Scott weighed in himself on the film’s failure to Variety, where he blamed it on millennials and cell phones:

“I think what it boils down to — what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these f***ing cell phones. The millennian [sic] do not ever want to be taught anything unless you are told it on the cell phone… This is a broad stroke, but I think we’re dealing with it right now with Facebook. There is a misdirection that has happened where it’s given the wrong kind of confidence to this latest generation, I think.”

“I think what it boils down to — what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these f***ing cell phones. The millennian [sic] do not ever want to be taught anything unless you are told it on the cell phone… This is a broad stroke, but I think we’re dealing with it right now with Facebook. There is a misdirection that has happened where it’s given the wrong kind of confidence to this latest generation, I think.”

While some of Scott’s conclusions are incorrect, and blaming an entire generation for his film not connecting is misguided, there are elements of truth to it. Different generations have looked for different things from their theatrical experiences, and the slower, historical bent of The Last Duel offered something less appealing than the franchise thrills that dominated the 2021 box office.

In English-language films, the highest performances of 2021 came from Spider-Man: No Way Home, No Time to Die, F9, and Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

It is easier now to get a clear picture of why The Last Duel didn’t succeed. The material did not align with much of the escapism that audiences were looking for at the multiplex during such a difficult period in global health struggles. Telling a story about sexual assault was also a difficult topic to promote on the big screen.

More than anything, a film of this sort requires a smaller budget to succeed in today’s market. If released now, with the right kind of marketing and a scaled-down cost, there is still potential for films like The Last Duel.

However, they do not drive the box office in the same way as they might have in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Gladiator was a huge hit, and instead perform better on streaming.

However it is looked at, The Last Duel is a genuinely fantastic film that absolutely deserves to be watched. Filled with great performances and grounded with a fantastic script, it’s one of the best movies of the last 10 years.