While Marvel Studios expected The Marvels to blast off to higher box office last weekend, the Captain Marvel sequel from Nia DaCosta still topped the box office for the weekend and officially became the highest grossing theatrical release of all time by a Black woman director at $110 million.
In it’s first three weekdays of release, The Marvels has added more than $7 million domestic to its coffers, and at least as much internationally, but that still puts the film at perhaps $125 million as the early preview screenings for Trolls Band Together and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes roll out Thursday night.
This competition will make it hard for The Marvels to hold on to a large percentage of its audience heading into its second weekend. The Hunger Games prequel is tracking toward a $100 million debut to top the weekend box office, while the Trolls sequel already has a head start with $70 million in its international coffers heading into the weekend and eyeing a $35 million domestic bow.
Which all adds up to The Marvels probably taking third place worldwide, and possibly third place domestically as well unless the film surprises with a miraculously strong second weekend hold.
Sadly, the B grade from audiences via Cinemascore, lack of strong or rising positive buzz among the mainstream public, and the competition this weekend and the next — when Wish and Napoleon arrive to further eat into audience demographics — all suggests The Marvels will probably suffer a typical or worse declines in the weekends ahead.
It’s is a shame, in light of how fantastic the movie is. I’d like to hope for an Elemental-style long run situation developing, but there doesn’t seem to be the numbers anywhere to indicate such a thing happening — unless Marvel employs some outside-the-box promotions to rally audiences to the film, such as reaching out to Taylor Swift for some sort of mutually beneficial scenario as I suggested previously.
It’s starting to look increasingly like The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes might wind up winning the month of November in both global and domestic box office. Lionsgate would obviously love to see this film launch as profitable a trilogy as the original The Hunger Games, which brought in billions in box office and merchandising.
But we are in a very different type of place in cinema history nowadays, with both theatrical and home entertainment undergoing an evolution of both viewing habits and technologies, so it’s all uncertain.
For comparison, and as a sign of just how bad things are in 2023 for box office, the previous franchise low for a domestic opening gross in The Hunger Games franchise was $102 million for Mockingjay – Part 2 back in 2015. This weekend, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is expected to make only about half that much.
What looked like a sure thing for The Marvels to dominate the November holiday window and play well into December is now turning into a “what went wrong?” scenario. After Barbie took more than $1.4 billion this summer, and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour became the biggest concert movie of all time last month with a certified blockbuster at $240 million and counting, it looked like women and girl audiences were flexing their power at the multiplex.
But keep in mind, wider marketing for films besides trailers and TV spots was hard without cast on hand to promote The Marvels as a strike dragged on and undermined the performance of so many projects, and the MCU is particularly famous for how connected fans and audiences feel to these films precisely because the casts are always so involved in maintaining that connection.
It’s also true that, while I don’t think an overarching or permanent “superhero fatigue” is at play, I do believe the genre is suffering from a combination of factors that undeniably include diminished public enthusiasm due to the collapse of interest in DCEU and the also-ran feel of some of the Sony live-action non-MCU Spider-Man spinoff films.
And Marvel, while not suffering major problems or anything remotely on par with the exaggerated press claims and certain fan reactions online, has still also had some issues with their films as well — from the VFX artists complaining about rushed conditions that results in less than polished CGI, to a large slate of streaming series necessitating Feige stepping away from his usual hands-on role in most of the MCU theatrical releases and the simple fact of enthusiasm being impossible to maintain at the fullest levels achieved by the time Avengers: Endgame arrived.
I’d point out that it’s surely not insignificant that the film didn’t carry the title Captain Marvel 2 to drive home for viewers that this was a sequel film to another movie everyone saw and liked. I realize the title The Marvels sounds cooler than a numbered sequel, but Marvel is successful precisely because it’s been so great at branding and audiences respond to MCU branding well.
Then there’s also Covid-19, which remains a factor, and the fact we are seeing not just new Covid-19 variants but also flu and RSV rising in places around the country. Plus, children being in school at the moment reduces weekday box office potential, which means it can’t help make up lost ground and benefit from even wider daily word of mouth as easily.
But we cannot ignore the fact the film received mixed critical reactions and a B grade from audiences. Underlying this is data pointing to far worse reception for The Marvels among male viewers, whose significantly lower scores drove the average score down. Meanwhile, many male reviewers seem inclined to engage in dismissing superhero movies starring women and for audiences of women and girls.
Indeed, some of the worst examples include critics literally complaining that The Marvels feels like it’s “made for teen girls” but “not for actual comic book fans,” as if the former cannot be the latter. This chronic myopic sexism is shameful and an embarrassment to both fandom and entertainment journalism.
At the end of the day, The Marvels is underperforming because of all of these various factors and more, and whatever else we can say, the end result is the film will most likely be considered a flop with a box office outcome similar to The Incredible Hulk back in the earliest days of the MCU. And Marvel’s loss will be The Hunger Games prequel’s gain, it seems, although even this victory is bittersweet to some extent in light of the initial box office numbers.
It’s true The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’ $100 million budget is the lowest of the series since the first film, but it’s still also only about $30-40 million or so lower than the cost of the other three films in the series. So the film’s likely significantly lower box office opening is only perhaps halfway offset by the budgetary savings.
This weekend, we’ll see if The Marvels faces the expected declines while The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes takes the crown, and whether either film can find staying power in overseas markets to improve its lot.
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