Misty Green Opens Small While Rosalind Eleazar Breaks Out

Misty Green opened Oct. 9 in six U.S. theaters and took in $85,716 over the weekend. Chris Rock wrote and directed a satire about a gifted actress Hollywood will not book, then the booking itself looked like the joke.

Rosalind Eleazar still leaves with the part. The character she plays does not. That split is the whole release.

A24 Opened the Comeback on Six Screens

Friday made $27,200. Saturday rose 19.5 percent to $32,509. Sunday fell 20 percent to $26,007. The per-theater average for the weekend was $14,286, a healthy figure for a platform and a tiny one for a Toronto gala with Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya, and Anna Kendrick in support.

Monday, Oct. 12, added $13,004, down 50 percent, for a $85,716 from six theaters weekend and a four-day domestic total of $98,720. Box Office Mojo already prints a widest listing of 125 theaters. On Oct. 14, A24 said the film goes nationwide on Friday, Oct. 16.

THE FIRST FOUR DAYS

A24’s listing for the film still frames it as a second-act story, 103 minutes, rated R. In Britain it carries a 15 certificate from British classifiers. The company that sold Rock’s last TIFF launch as a wide Christmas comedy is not in this picture.

An Audition So Bad She Boarded a Plane

Eleazar, the Ghanaian British actor most U.S. viewers know as Louisa Guy on Apple TV’s Slow Horses, has said she treated the lead as a long shot. Rock has said he saw close to 100 actors. She did two Zooms from London. The second one, she has said, was wrecked by a heavy-metal studio next door, trains, and lagging Wi-Fi. She cried on the call and asked him not to judge the tech faults as her work. Then she bought a flight to Los Angeles and walked into the room.

Rock, 61, put the choice in blunt terms after the Toronto premiere. She was the best actress who came in, point blank, he said, and it was not even a subjective call. She asked about the character instead of herself. At a later New York screening he said he wanted the Misty he could spend three months with, the one with the most going on behind her eyes.

She’s a survivor, and I’d like to think I’ve got a bit of that.

Rosalind Eleazar, actress, speaking in New York

She has also said her first pass through the script ended in a body-level no. Anything that petrifies her, she told a reporter, is the thing she has to chase. Rock’s working rule on set, as she remembered it, was simple: his movie, her character. She filled in the flesh. Costume designer Neishea Lemle put her in boots for almost the whole shoot. Eleazar took singing lessons nearly every day in Los Angeles, because the songs are where Misty drops the armor.

What Misty Green Has Left to Sell

The film gives her a week. Amy Landecker plays Celine, the widow of Misty’s older, married lover, and she is throwing the actress out of a Santa Monica beach apartment. An Emmy for best supporting actress sits on a shelf with Misty’s name on it. Celine looks at it and asks if that is her. It is. It is also not enough.

Rock shoots Los Angeles as a grind with tents on the sidewalk and a transactional sex market behind the auditions. Misty is broke, hungry for a Dreamgirls reboot, and still willing to blow the night before a callback. Driver’s Zach, a filmmaker and sometime lover, knows how she could make a serious payday by morning. Kaluuya’s Jay, her brother, is newly out and needs money and care she does not have. Topher Grace’s Randy, the former agent, is the closest thing to a grown-up in the room and is still in the business.

THE WEEK THE FILM GIVES HER

• The eviction: Celine grants one week to clear the beach apartment that was never legally hers.
• The reboot: Jordan, the filmmaker Rock plays, is remaking Dreamgirls and knows Misty’s voice, and also remembers how her temper ended their last job.
• The sideline: Zach’s offer is cash for sex work, dressed up as a friend’s favor.
• The brother: Jay needs chronic support the same week Misty needs a place to sleep.
• The tape: She still has to light her own self-tapes, like every other actor the town has stopped calling.

Eleazar sings a down-tempo “One Night Only” in the picture. People who saw it at Toronto talked about that scene the way they talked about the audition hangover. The trailer A24 posted in July is the cleanest look at the bargain she is being asked to make.

Marcus Miller wrote the score, his fourth job with Rock after Head of State, Everybody Hates Chris, and I Think I Love My Wife. Kira Kelly shot it. Adam Dicterow cut it. Peter Rice produced with Rock, David Worthen Brooks, and Victoria Thomas. The project had first been set at Neon in November 2024 with Macro Film Studios and Confluential Films, then moved to A24 in July 2025 and shot in Los Angeles.

Twelve Years After a $12.5 Million Bid

Rock’s last feature as writer-director was Top Five, which premiered at Toronto on Sept. 6, 2014. Studios bid. Paramount paid $12.5 million for worldwide rights and pledged more than $20 million to sell it. The film had a $12 million budget, went wide on Dec. 12, 2014, and took $25.3 million in the United States and $26.1 million worldwide. Critics logged an 85 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Misty Green is the fourth fiction feature he has directed, after Head of State in 2003, I Think I Love My Wife in 2007, and that 2014 comedy. Twelve years later the same festival launched him again, this time in the Gala Presentations section in Toronto on Sept. 12, then in the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival on Sept. 26. A24 kept the U.S. run limited on Oct. 9. Neon still handles foreign rights. The encore did not get a bidding war. It got six screens and a promise to go wider on Oct. 16.

TWO TORONTO LAUNCHES

The older film was about a comic who wanted to be taken seriously. This one is about an actress who already was, and cannot get the town to take her call. Rock gave himself a smaller part this time and put the camera on Eleazar. The commercial pattern still followed him. Festival heat, then a much smaller room than the last time Toronto loved him.

The Harshest Take Is About Who Gets Hurt

Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 60 percent from 60 reviews, with an average of 5.8 out of 10. Metacritic has it at 68 from 24 critics, logged as generally favorable: 14 positive, 9 mixed, 1 negative. Those numbers hide a fight about what Rock thinks he is allowed to do to a Black woman on screen.

WHERE EXPERTS DISAGREE

• Owen Gleiberman: The critic called it the best movie about Hollywood in years and said Rock had confirmed himself as a major filmmaker, praising Eleazar as a party-girl actress played at full brilliance.
• Rendy Jones: The critic wrote that no matter how harsh the system is toward Black women, Rock will find a way to be harsher, and labelled the film putrid and hateful.
• The middle camp: Several notices treat Eleazar as the reason to stay and the last act as the reason to flinch, a showcase strapped to a speech the movie has not earned.

People who heard Rock’s New York Q&A came away with a second bruise. Other actresses, he said, did not want the role because of how it would make them look. He treated that as brand management. One reply to Jones pointed out that the two main Black roles went to British actors, Eleazar and Kaluuya, in a film that talks as if it owns African American pain. That complaint sits next to the raves and does not cancel them. It is the argument the 60 percent is made of.

Eleazar has not played that fight in interviews. She has said the writing felt honest and ugly about the industry’s dark side, and that she wanted to express something with a woman who is complicated, contradictory, and self-destructive. At the New York festival she told the crowd Misty is difficult to get on board with for exactly that reason.

Rock’s Last Act Fights His First Two

For a long stretch the movie is a day-by-day countdown: hospital after a drunk-driving crash, a desert morning-after, the apartment she is losing, the callback she may not deserve. Sex is part of the deal-making. Her agent is not a saint. Anna Kendrick’s Naomi is a friend who will marry money and might not catch Misty if she falls. Ice-T and Busta Rhymes show up as themselves. The town looks nothing like a postcard.

Then Rock reaches for a murder story around a young woman and a young Black man, and for on-screen text about mental health. Several critics who liked the first hour said the payoff feels unhooked from the life they had been watching. Misty’s own arc, in those accounts, turns tidy in a way the performance is not. The actress keeps playing a person. The script starts playing a lesson.

That is a cruel rhyme with the plot. Misty can sing and act and still miss the job because she will not sit still long enough to take it. The movie can be alive for 80 minutes and still miss the landing because it will not sit still either. Eleazar does not get a clean last scene to carry home. She gets a film that needed one.

Festival Medals Arrive Ahead of Ticket Buyers

The awards circuit did not wait for the six theaters to fill. On Sept. 13, the day after the Toronto gala, Eleazar received the TIFF Tribute Performer Award. Middleburg has her down for its Breakthrough Actor Award on Oct. 18. SCAD Savannah lists a Breakthrough Award on Oct. 26. On Oct. 15 she was in London in Alexander McQueen for a BFI London Film Festival screening, on a press loop that had already run New York, Paris, and a Slow Horses shoot in the same week.

THE ROAD FROM GALA TO MULTIPLEX

1. Nov. 1, 2024: Neon, Macro, and Confluential announce Rock will write, direct, and star in Misty Green.
2. July 2025: The film moves to A24 and starts production in Los Angeles, with Eleazar, Driver, Kaluuya, and Kendrick in the cast.
3. Sept. 12, 2026: World premiere as a Toronto Gala; Eleazar is honored the next day.
4. Sept. 26, 2026: U.S. premiere in the New York Film Festival Main Slate.
5. Oct. 9, 2026: U.S. theatrical opening in 6 theaters, $85,716 for the weekend.
6. Oct. 16, 2026: A24 takes the film nationwide, with Box Office Mojo already listing 125 theaters as the widest run.

Ready for their close-ups. MISTY GREEN is in theaters nationwide this Friday. pic.twitter.com/E8ienXo9MG

— A24 (@A24) October 14, 2026

A24’s Oct. 14 post put the cast in close-up and said the film would be in theaters nationwide that Friday. The character on screen still has a week to get her things out of someone else’s apartment. The woman who played her is already collecting medals for a comeback the fiction will not grant. That is the release, and it is also the plot.