Dennis Quaid's New Action Movie With a 'The Last of Us' Star Earns a Surprising Rotten Tomatoes Rating Ahead of Debut

From one of the best movies about the space race in The Right Stuff, to disgusting audiences to wonderful effect in Coralie Fargeat's Oscar-winning The Substance, Dennis Quaid has been involved in many high-rated projects. After his earlier 2025 project alongside Wyatt Russell, Broke, shot to a huge 91% from critics on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, attention has now turned to his second big-screen project of the year: Sovereign.

Set to debut in theaters on July 11, the same day as James Gunn’s Superman, eyes have turned to the early Rotten Tomatoes score of Sovereign to see whether it can keep up with Quaid's strong recent record of well-received projects. Despite receiving just 11 reviews at the time of writing, Sovereign officially has a strong Rotten Tomatoes critics' score of 82%, which, although lower than both Broke and The Substance, still marks Quaid's joint third-best critics' score on the site since all the way back to 2010, when he played former President Bill Clinton in The Special Relationship.

Also starring the ever-brilliant Nick Offerman and The Little Mermaid's Jacob Tremblay and Last Man Standing star Nancy Travis, among others, and written and directed by Proud Mary's Christian Swegal, Sovereign is a movie inspired by true events. A true crime thriller that pulls none of its many punches, the film follows a father and his son, "who follow the Sovereign Citizen belief system, a deeply anti-establishment worldview rooted in distrust of government authority." The synopsis continues, "As the pair travel across the country delivering self-taught legal seminars and pushing back against systems they believe have failed them, their journey brings them into conflict with Police Chief Jim Bouchart (Quaid), setting off a tragic chain of events that forces a reckoning with power, principle, and the limits of freedom."

What is 'Sovereign's Box Office Competition?

If releasing alongside Superman wasn't hard enough, Sovereign arguably faces the most difficult batch of box office opponents of the year so far. After a 2025-best opening weekend, the hardest of these opponents is likely to be the big-budget Jurassic World Rebirth, with Universal’s How to Train Your Dragon remake and Joseph Kosinski's pulse-racing F1 following suit. Elsewhere in theaters, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning and Disney's live-action Lilo & Stitch remake offer long-standing competition, with the likes of Pixar's Elio and Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Years Later also proving fairly popular.