Robert De Niro acting opposite himself as the two lead characters in his new mob movie has not produced anything like double the dough at the box office.
The Alto Knights opened on Friday but is already on track to be one of the biggest flops of 2025.
Its first weekend in cinemas resulted in a poor showing of just $3.1miilion (£2.39m) in the US, against a reported production budget of around $50m (£38.7m).
Add the foreign haul and that’s only £1.9m (£1.46m) more, making for an overall worldwide box office performance of $5.06m (£3.9m), just 10 per cent of its initial cost.
The movie opened in a very disappointing sixth place the same day as Snow White – which hit number one but also fell short of its somewhat cautious estimate of a $100m (£77.3m) global haul with $87.3m (£67.5m).
Outside any last-minute miracle, it’s unlikely The Alto Knights will bounce back with higher figure, meaning the movie is on track to lose money instead.
It marks the second box office flop in a row for Warner Bros after Bong Joon Ho teamed up with Robert Pattinson for the off-beat sci-fi Mickey 17, which has earned $110m (£85m) globally so far but cost a reported $120m (£92m) to make and would have needed more like $250m (£193m) to break even.
The Alto Knights still presents an intriguing offering to fans though, as 81-year-old screen legend De Niro stars as both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, real-life mob bosses whose childhood friendship decays into a deadly rivalry.
The film, which has been in the works since the early 1970s, is the perfect vehicle for a performer of De Niro’s calibre, supported by Debra Messing, Cosmo Jarvis, Kathrine Narducci and The Sopranos star Michael Rispoli.
The consistently in-demand star looks – and sounds – most like himself as Costello in the film but has been given a dramatic transformation to star as Genovese as well.
It’s not just the magic of movie make-up either, although the Raging Bull actor looks totally different with prosthetics on the lower half of his face.
He also displays totally different body language and an altered voice with a much higher pitch and a rapid-fire delivery, to the extent that unless you already know it’s De Niro x De Niro in this film, you could be forgiven for looking up the actor afterwards – or wondering if it’s Joe Pesci under the make-up.
Directed by Rain Man filmmaker Barry Levinson and produced by industry icon Irwin Winkler, 93, The Alto Knights is a De Niro film in its bones, being reminiscent of movies he’s starred in before – such as The Irishman, Goodfellas, The Untouchables, The Godfather Part II, Mean Streets and Once Upon A Time in America.
It’s also written by Goodfellas and Casino scribe Nicholas Pileggi.
But we’ve moved beyond the hype around De Niro appearing in films and scenes opposite friend and fellow Hollywood heavyweight Al Pacino, to him starring opposite himself (insert the ‘You talkin’ to me?’ mirror reference from Taxi Driver that no journalist has been able to resist mentioning).
It was producer Winkler who had the idea that De Niro should play the parts of both Costello and Genovese, which De Niro agreed to as it ‘would have been more justification for my doing another gangster movie’.
The star revealed that he was still concerned about making sure he could differentiate well enough between both characters though, particularly in the scenes that he shared with himself.
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‘I needed another actor opposite me, I couldn’t just do it someone reading off a page, so this guy Joe Bacino, I decided on him doing it, and he learned both parts,’ the actor revealed on The View. ‘So I worked with him and it was a tremendous help.’
The Alto Knights also boasts Heat’s cinematographer, Dante Spinotti, with Levinson also having directed mob movies with 1982’s Diner and 1991’s Bugsy.
The film is named after a real-life Manhattan social club which Genovese took over in the 1950s.
The Alto Knights is is cinemas from today.
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