Charli XCX’s Messy Mockumentary Tears Competition Apart in Record-Breaking Box Office Debut

1 week ago 9

Published Feb 2, 2026, 2:50 PM EST

Rahul Malhotra is a Weekend News Writer for Collider. From Francois Ozon to David Fincher, he'll watch anything once.

He has been writing for Collider for over two years, and has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal to introduce audiences to a whole new world of cinema.

Swing and a miss > measured victory. Also, #JusticeForHan. (He/Him).

While YouTuber Markiplier's horror film Iron Lung surprised the industry with its strong box office debut this weekend, another title attracted major buzz lower down the charts. Pop star Charli XCX's mockumentary The Moment, a fictionalized version of the events surrounding the viral success of her 2024 album "Brat," opened in just four theaters nationwide. It delivered one of the biggest limited-release box office debuts of the last five years, behind only the Oscar-contender Marty Supreme and Wes Anderson's 2023 offering, Asteroid City. The Moment marks the directorial debut of the pop star's longtime creative collaborator, Aidan Zamiri, and is slated to expand nationwide this week.

The movie grossed $428,000 on just four screens this past weekend, for a per-theater average of $107,000. This is the third-biggest limited debut since 2020, and the third-biggest in distributor A24's history, behind Marty Supreme and Uncut Gems. As a result, The Moment delivered the top per-theater average at the domestic box office this weekend, when Sam Raimi's Send Help topped the list with a $20 million haul. Unlike that film, The Moment has divided critics. It holds a 62% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics' consensus reads, "Satirizing Brat Summer and the pitfalls of pop stardom, The Moment is a mockumentary that could've used sharper barbs, but Charli XCX acquits herself well as a presence that can bind even an unwieldy movie together."

Charli XCX Earned Praise for Her Performance in 'The Moment'

In his 7/10 review, Collider's Ross Bonaime praised Charli's screen presence and wrote, "It will be interesting to see if Charli is able to handle a major role that isn't based on her life in the future, but The Moment certainly shows that she has the chops." However, ScreenRant's Gregory Nussen called it an "unmitigated disaster" in his 3/10 review. The pop star also has major roles in Gregg Araki’s upcoming I Want Your Sex and Cathy Yan's The Gallerist. The Moment includes cameos from Kylie Jenner, Rachel Sennott, and Julia Fox as fictionalized versions of themselves, and also features Alexander Skarsgård, Jamie Demetriou, Rosanna Arquette, and Kate Berlant in supporting roles. The movie arrives only a couple of years after HBO's The Idol, a disastrous drama that also attempted to unpack pop stardom but was cancelled after it received poor reviews and ratings.