Brad Pitt Earns Career-Best Reviews as Heart of the Beast Opens at 96%

LOS ANGELES — Eight years ago, David Ayer delivered his director’s cut of Suicide Squad to Warner Bros. and watched the studio replace it with a version so thoroughly reedited that he has publicly refused to call it his film. Today, Ayer opens Heart of the Beast for Paramount Pictures with a 96 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes — the best reviews of his career, and the best reviews of his star’s.

Brad Pitt, at 62, has appeared in films that won Best Picture. He has produced films that won Best Picture. He has never, until now, earned a 96 percent score as a starring performer. The figure beats his 95 percent on 12 Years a Slave, where he played a supporting role, and places Heart of the Beast in a tier of career-defining work that arrives well after most actors’ primes.

Pitt plays James Belmont, a former Special Forces veterinarian who crashes a transport plane somewhere above the Alaska Range and survives with his combat dog Odin — a real German Shepherd named Uber, outfitted with a titanium artificial leg and trained to work through what the production described as canine PTSD. The film runs 101 minutes, carries a PG-13 rating, and cost Paramount $82 million to produce, making it a genuine mid-budget anomaly in a marketplace that has largely abandoned the category between $40 million and $150 million for either smaller prestige pictures or franchise behemoths.

The Hollywood Reporter‘s review describes the film as “the clearest argument in recent memory that Ayer belongs in the same conversation as Kathryn Bigelow: a director who finds moral weight in soldiers without ever aestheticizing their violence.” That framing matters. Ayer’s reputation has spent years pinned to a film he says was taken from him; the critical reaction to Heart of the Beast is the first major evidence that the reputation was always misdirected.

Ayer, for his part, has said only that he is “grateful Paramount let me make the movie I set out to make.” The studio’s fingerprints are notably light in the finished cut — no visible franchise architecture, no mid-credits setup, no sequel-baiting final shot. That decision either reads as Paramount‘s confidence in a standalone bet, or as the kind of creative latitude studios extend to a director they expect to bring back on a longer leash if the numbers hold.

Whether the numbers hold is the open question at the start of this weekend. Tracking services have ranged from $14 million to $20 million for the three-day domestic frame — a spread that reflects genuine uncertainty about how a survival film centered on a man and a three-legged dog translates to opening-weekend foot traffic. The studio’s internal estimate, per sources familiar with the tracking, sits closer to $16 million.

That figure would place Heart of the Beast in modest but profitable territory for an $82 million release — not the kind of opening that generates green-light announcements over the weekend, but enough to deliver the film its legs into October, when the marketplace clears ahead of the holiday push. The more significant competitive factor is what opened ahead of it. Resident Evil launched to $55 million two weekends ago, setting a franchise record under director Zach Cregger, and has spent its second weekend absorbing the audience that tends to turn out for mid-budget action-adjacent films. Heart of the Beast has to carve its own lane.

The weekend also marks the arrival of Primetime, the A24 film starring Robert Pattinson as television journalist Chris Hansen, which is opening on roughly 1,800 screens after winning the Venice Special Jury Prize. The two films are not competing for the same audience — Primetime is a philosophical provocation playing on festival circuit momentum; Heart of the Beast is a man-and-dog survival film with a genuine action set piece in its second act. Both openings are testing the same hypothesis: that audiences will pay $17 for a non-franchise film if the reviews are distinctive enough.

At Paramount, the release lands at an unusual moment. Judge Martínez-Olguín deferred ruling on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery consent decree at a hearing this week, leaving the $111 billion merger’s September 30 closing deadline at risk. Those two storylines share a Paramount letterhead, but Heart of the Beast was greenlit and produced under an entirely different leadership structure, and its performance will not change the outcome of any courtroom.

Pitt’s own production context adds texture to the release. His next project as a starring performer — The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, directed by David Fincher for Tarantino’s first sequel — is already in theaters as a teaser this weekend, attached to prints of Resident Evil. At 62, Pitt is operating simultaneously as marquee star, seasoned producer, and the subject of nascent awards-season speculation. The 96 percent on Heart of the Beast is the highest critical score of his career in a leading role, and the awards machinery will note it.

What no one at the studio, or in the trades, can quite answer yet is whether James Belmont and a three-legged German Shepherd add up to a Best Actor campaign. The answer arrives with Saturday’s actuals. In the meantime, David Ayer has his movie.