More than a decade ago, Heneral Luna (2015) surprised the nation by grossing over ₱250 million at the box office—a figure typically reserved for rom-coms or mainstream dramas in the local industry. Two years later, Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral (2018) kept the flame alive, albeit to a lesser degree, earning over ₱160 million, according to Inquirer.
Flash forward to 2025: TBA Studios attempts to recapture the magic with Quezon, the conclusion to the now-called Bayaniverse trilogy. In today’s climate, will they have another success story on their hands?
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| Quezon (C) Rolling Stone |
Always the challenging type
It should be remembered, however, that the path to Luna's success was not an easy one. With a production budget of around ₱80 million, the epic war film was not an instant box office hit to a point that it only had 40 screens left playing Luna during a few moments of its second week. Luna's executive producer Fernando Ortigas and screenwriter-producer Eduardo A. Rocha even asked supporters to message their local cinemas to extend the film's screenings to which netizens responded.
With buzz and talk further rising, the second week actually grossed higher than its opening week. While there are some inconsistencies in reporting from Box Office Mojo and direct producers such as Atty. Joji Alonso, both agreed on that the film only continued to rise from its opening week - a peculiar performance for any movie. Per Box Office Mojo, third week went higher with the fourth being its top selling week, grossing over ₱41 million. It's true case of a word-of-mouth hit.
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| Heneral Luna. (C) The Hollywood Reporter |
Quezon faces various dilemmas. As the main trailer likely suggests, the historical drama will unsurprisingly lean less on the action and more on the political intrigue.
The film also arrives at a very different marketplace. It has been harder to release Filipino films outside the Metro Manila Film Festival and not under the Star Cinema banner (Sunshine grossed over ₱47 million while the Stella sequel made ₱50 million in two weeks). As ticket prices continue to soar, sometimes even higher than our neighbor markets, attendance has been on an bumpy slope. Success is once again a tall order for the film that was supposedly going to be funded by Amazon Prime.
Go big and familiar
Whether strategic or not, Quezon boasts a much bigger cast led by Jericho Rosales. They even have Game of Thrones actor Iain Glen playing Leonard Wood, a former Governor-General of the Philippines. The scale is already evident in the campaign, with Rosales and Karylle gracing magazine covers and appearing on TV shows and with social media personalities to revitalize their presence in the mainstream.
Interestingly, and quite fittingly, there are some similarities between the Quezon campaign and its fellow Bayaniverse entries. TBA Studios once again collaborated with DAKILA and Active Vista for a nationwide forum to reexamine national heroes and their place in the country’s socio-political landscape. A 10-minute preview of the film was also shown during these school tours, echoing a similar strategy used for Luna.
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| (C) TBA Studios YouTube Channel |
They also staged a miting de avance-style event at SM Mall of Asia last September, just weeks after the trailer was released online. The cast has been highly active as well since as early as June, they’ve been attending key events like ToyCon 2025 and touring malls across the country to promote advance ticket sales. TBA Studios and the cast’s social media pages have also been active in running promotions for the film.
Reality strikes
Yet despite all these efforts, Quezon is currently performing only modestly in pre-sales, according to CBO's independent tracking. To be fair, the film isn’t fan-driven like Demon Slayer, nor does it ride on genres that consistently draw large Filipino audiences, such as horror, with this year’s current top-grossers being The Conjuring: Last Rites and Final Destination: Bloodlines. However, early sales suggest that Quezon may need to follow in the footsteps of Heneral Luna, relying heavily on word-of-mouth to gain momentum.
While it can be argued that there is a space for everybody online, perhaps the mood of the nation due to current events and cinephiles’ preoccupation with the ongoing Cinemalaya 2025 may be key reasons why the final stretch of the film’s campaign has remained largely under the radar. It also didn’t help that, aside from Cinemalaya, both the Metro Manila Film Festival and the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino (Gawad Urian Awards) hosted major events the weekend right before Quezon's release.
Cinemalaya 2025 wraps up on October 12 (C) Cinemalaya
Is it a few years too late? The Conjuring has shown that the 2010s are now ripe for nostalgia which is something Quezon's marketing has also been trying to tap into. Given that the most recent entry, Goyo, arguably wasn’t as memorable as Luna, enough time may have passed to refocus attention on the goodwill generated by the John Arcilla-led film.
Fortunately, there’s still time—albeit ticking. As of this writing, the film has only one publicly available trailer, and advance screenings are just about to begin. In terms of competition, there won’t be a major mainstream release until Wicked: For Good in the second half of November, potentially giving Quezon room to build momentum if it connects with the public.
In a recent Rolling Stone feature, Philbert Dy asked TBA Studios President and producer Daphne Chiu why they pushed through with the film despite numerous hurdles. “Because it’s the last,” Chiu responded. “We started something. Sayang naman kung hindi namin tatapusin.”
From October 15 onward, the decision is up to Filipinos: will they be on board for one last ride?
