Heart of the Beast Review Roundup: Critics Split, Audiences Don't, Box Office Lands in Third
When we last wrote about Heart of the Beast, back before its San Sebastián premiere, there was nothing to review yet — just a trailer, a festival lineup slot, and a lot of pre-release framing about Brad Pitt and David Ayer reuniting for the first time since Fury. That gap has since closed. The film premiered in Franklin, Tennessee on September 16, played San Sebastián out of competition, and opened wide across US theaters on September 25. A real batch of reviews and a real opening-weekend number now exist, and between the two, a fairly specific picture of the film emerges: critics are more divided than the marketing suggested, audiences are considerably less divided, and the box office landed in a respectable-but-unspectacular third place.
The Numbers, Up Front
Rotten Tomatoes has Heart of the Beast sitting at 86% fresh from 155 critics, with an average score of 6.9 out of 10. That's a solid, comfortably-positive critical consensus by the site's own math, though it's worth noting the average score sits meaningfully below what an 86% fresh rating might suggest on its own — a lot of "fresh" reviews here are lukewarm-positive rather than enthusiastic raves, which tracks with the more mixed individual reviews below. Metacritic, which weights reviews differently and tends to run colder than Rotten Tomatoes on genre fare, has the film at 66 out of 100 from 31 critics, landing in that site's "generally favorable" band rather than its top tier.
The more eye-catching number is the audience side. Rotten Tomatoes' Popcornmeter has Heart of the Beast at 93% from more than 1,000 verified ratings — a wide gap above the critic score, and a gap in the direction that survival-thriller audiences tend to reward: they showed up wanting a man-and-dog story to work, and by their own accounting, it worked. Several outlets, including MovieWeb, ScreenRant, and Forbes, have framed that 93% as something close to a record for the genre. That specific "record" framing is worth treating as reported rather than independently confirmed — it's the kind of claim that spreads across entertainment coverage quickly without every outlet running its own underlying comparison, so it's fair to note here without stating it as settled fact.
What the Plot Actually Delivers
For anyone catching up: Pitt plays James Belmont, a retired Special Forces Sergeant Major whose seaplane goes down in the Alaskan wilderness after he suffers a mid-flight heart attack. He survives the crash with his combat German Shepherd, Odin, and the film follows the two of them on a trek of roughly 50 to 58 miles through grizzly territory, wolf packs, and Belmont's own injuries, trying to reach help. J.K. Simmons and Anna Lambe round out the billed cast, and Odin's screen performance was split across four different dogs — Uber, Seeka, Ryker, and Hondo — rather than the single Belgian Malinois that dominated pre-release coverage. David Ayer directs from a script by Cameron Alexander, and the film runs a tight 101 minutes, distributed by Paramount Pictures. That's the whole plot, essentially: survival mechanics and a bond between a soldier and his dog, stretched across a runtime short enough that it doesn't have much room to pad itself out with subplot.
AV Club: "So-So," and a Little Skeptical of Its Own Sincerity
The AV Club's review is the sharpest and most specific critical pushback in this roundup, and it's worth quoting at length because it lands on a consistent argument rather than a scattershot list of complaints. The review calls the film "so-so" overall, and gets more pointed with its framing of the genre territory it's working in, describing Heart of the Beast as "a Bass Pro Shops-branded take on Jack London" — a line that does double duty, needling both the film's corporate-outdoorsy aesthetic and its debt to London's own turn-of-the-century survival fiction without doing anything especially new with that inheritance.
The review's core complaint is credibility strain. It singles out a moment where Belmont can "start a fire with one hand tied behind his back," treating that kind of frictionless competence as symptomatic of a broader problem — a survival story where the protagonist is skilled enough that the actual survival stops feeling like much of a struggle.
And on the emotional register, the AV Club is blunter still, writing that the film's emotional beats are "played so ham-fistedly, so cloyingly, and with so little restraint" that they end up wasting Pitt's talents on what the review calls a "meat-and-potatoes, cable programmer scenario" — the implication being that a star of Pitt's range is capable of more understated, more affecting work than a film this eager to underline its own sentimentality actually asks of him.
None of that reads as a pan, though. The AV Club singles out the dog performance specifically as a bright spot, calling it "scene-stealing" and praising Odin as "a refreshingly flesh-and-blood animal star" — a notable choice of words given how much pre-release marketing leaned into Odin's realness as a selling point, since it suggests that groundwork actually paid off on screen rather than getting buried under other production choices. The review also credits the film's "sweeping aerial landscapes," giving Ayer and his cinematography team real, specific credit for the Alaskan wilderness photography even while arguing the story built inside that landscape doesn't earn its emotional swings.
RogerEbert.com: The Warmer Read
Coverage from RogerEbert.com leaned more positive than the AV Club's take, according to available reporting on the review, positioning the site's assessment closer to the audience-score end of the spectrum than the more skeptical trade reviews. That's consistent with the general shape of this film's reception — reviewers who came in receptive to a straightforward, earnest survival story tend to describe the film more warmly, while reviewers looking for more formal ambition or restraint in how it handles its emotional beats are the ones landing closer to the AV Club's read.
The Hollywood Reporter also covered the film's reception, though its own review sits largely behind reporting that's headline-level rather than fully accessible here, so it's worth flagging as a real signal without treating any specific language from it as a direct quote. Between RogerEbert.com's warmer framing and the AV Club's more critical one, the overall Rotten Tomatoes number — comfortably fresh, but with a middling average score underneath it — makes a lot of sense as an aggregate. It's a film with real defenders and real detractors among critics, landing somewhere in the "generally favorable, not a consensus rave" territory that Metacritic's own score describes.
Why the Critic-Audience Gap Exists
A 20-point-plus gap between an 86% critic score and a 93% audience score isn't unusual on its own — genre survival films with earnest emotional cores tend to play better with the audiences who actively choose to watch them than with critics assessing the film against a wider body of work. But the specific shape of the AV Club's complaints helps explain exactly where that gap is coming from here. The things the AV Club dings the film for — overstated emotional beats, a protagonist whose competence undercuts tension, a familiar genre template — are frequently the exact things a general audience walks into this kind of film wanting. Nobody buying a ticket to a Brad-Pitt-and-a-dog-versus-the-Alaskan-wilderness movie is necessarily hoping for restraint. They're hoping for a good cry and a dog that makes it out alive, and by the audience score's account, the film delivered both convincingly enough to generate an unusually high Popcornmeter number.
CinemaScore, the exit-poll grading system distinct from Rotten Tomatoes' online audience ratings, backs that read up independently: Heart of the Beast pulled an A− from opening-weekend audiences, a strong grade that tracks closely with the Popcornmeter's enthusiasm and suggests the positive audience reaction isn't just an online-review-bombing artifact but reflects how people actually felt walking out of the theater.
The Box Office: A Real Third Place, Not a Disaster
Heart of the Beast opened in third place at the domestic box office over its wide-release weekend, pulling in roughly $20 million domestically. Third place isn't a flop position, but it's also not the kind of number that suggests a runaway hit, especially for a film carrying a movie star of Pitt's stature and a fairly hefty marketing push that included a Dolby Cinema release. As of the most recent reporting available, the film's worldwide total stands at $51.7 million, split between $21.6 million domestic and $30.1 million international — meaning the international side has already outpaced the domestic haul, which is a fairly common pattern for star-driven survival and action fare that travels well regardless of language, given how much of the storytelling here is physical and visual rather than dialogue-dependent.
Whether that $51.7 million global figure represents a genuine financial win depends heavily on the film's production budget, marketing spend, and how its box office legs hold up in subsequent weeks — none of which is fully resolved yet this early in its run. A strong A− CinemaScore and a 93% audience score are both good indicators for word-of-mouth staying power over the following weeks, since audience-driven grades like those tend to predict whether a film holds its theater count or falls off sharply after opening weekend. If that word of mouth translates into slower-than-usual weekend-to-weekend drops, the film has a real path to meaningfully outgrow its opening number over the coming month.
Fury, Twelve Years Later — Does the Reunion Pay Off?
The Pitt-Ayer reunion angle that drove most of the pre-release coverage doesn't get a clean answer from this batch of reviews, and that's arguably the most interesting throughline connecting the AV Club's skepticism to the audience score's enthusiasm. Fury worked, when it worked, by refusing to soften its bleakness — it was a grim, unglamorous film about men under extreme pressure, and its power came partly from how little it tried to comfort its audience. The AV Club's complaint about Heart of the Beast being "played so ham-fistedly, so cloyingly" reads almost like a direct contrast to that earlier collaboration: a film willing to lean into sentiment and uplift in a way Fury never would have, for a much more mainstream, broadly commercial target audience.
That's not necessarily a knock on the choice itself. A survival story about a man and his dog is a fundamentally different emotional proposition than a World War II tank crew drama, and asking Heart of the Beast to replicate Fury's tone would have been an odd fit for the material regardless of who's behind the camera. But it does mean the "first film together since Fury" framing that dominated pre-release coverage turns out to be more of a curiosity than a throughline once the actual film is in front of audiences — this is Ayer working in a much softer register than the one that made his collaboration with Pitt memorable the first time, and the reviews reflect that shift more than they reflect any direct continuity between the two films.
Where This Leaves the Film
Put the pieces together and Heart of the Beast looks like a film that's doing reasonably well without becoming a phenomenon. The critic score is solidly positive without being a consensus rave, the audience score is genuinely strong and backed up by a matching CinemaScore grade, and the box office opened in a respectable third place with international numbers already outpacing domestic. None of that adds up to a disaster, and none of it adds up to the kind of awards-season conversation the early Revenant comparisons floated before anyone had actually seen the film. What it adds up to is a mid-tier survival thriller doing exactly what mid-tier survival thrillers tend to do when the emotional hook lands with audiences even as critics pick at the credibility of the survival mechanics underneath it — a real, if unspectacular, hit rather than either a flop or a breakout.
Expect the Rotten Tomatoes critic count to keep climbing over the coming weeks, along with a clearer picture of whether the film's international legs can close the gap on its production budget.