Ocean's Eight got a lot of grief for being a gender-swapped edition of an existing franchise, but one of the actresses involved has a response to the hate. Sarah Paulson has a response, but what she doesn't have is much of an opinion, because she doesn't really care what the haters have to say about the movie she was in. At the end of the day, she apparently had an absolute blast making Ocean's Eight and nobody really has that much control over whether or not a movie is a financial success. According to Paulson...
Everybody's rolling the dice every time you go out of the gate. We sort of delude ourselves into thinking we have some semblance of control or some idea about how things are going to go, and we just don't. At the end of the day, I bet you those girls had a fucking ball making Ghostbusters, and so who gives a fuck if anybody saw the movie? I'm not gonna spend too much time worrying about it. I had a fucking blast, and I made seven new friends.
A lot of parallels were drawn between Paul Feig's Ghostbusters reboot and Ocean's Eight. Both movies were additions to franchises that swapped out entirely male casts for entirely female casts. This resulted in both films receiving backlash. To what degree the backlash impacted the box office is far from clear, but Sarah Paulson isn't losing any sleep over the question. She had a blast making the movie, nothing else really matters to her.
For the record, Ocean's Eight did fine at the box office. It made almost $300 million globally on a budget reported to be around $70 million. It only came in about $15 million behind the previous entry in the franchise, Ocean's Thirteen, so it doesn't really look like the movie suffered. The Ghostbusters reboot fared somewhat more poorly. The film only made about $230 million and had a much higher budget due to the post-production digital effects.
According to Bustle, the stars of Ocean's Eight had a text chain going where they all communicated with each other on a regular basis, certainly confirming that the co-stars have remained close since making the movie together. For Sarah Paulson, the personal relationships are clearly going to be a bigger takeaway than the box office receipts. Why in the world would she waste time caring about how full the theater was?
Sarah Paulson is too busy to care about such things. In between filming series like American Horror Story and American Crime Story, the actress has been making movies like the upcoming Bird Box for Netflix and Glass for M. Night Shyamalan. And she's up for making an Ocean's Eight sequel, if only so she can hang out with her friends again.
