"Is Black Panther 2 a Commercial Failure?" My Last Word on the Subject (Probably)

Back when Black Panther 2 hit theaters I took up the question of the movie's commercial performance raising the possibility that given the reports of its budget (we heard figures like $250 million tossed about), the movie was not going to make back its cost in theatrical release, even as I allowed that other revenue streams could compensate.

Deadline's recent figures suggest this thinking was not far off the mark. The backers of the movie spent some $376 million on production, prints and ads, and overhead and interest, even before participations and residuals came into the picture--which eventually came to another $60 million.

By contrast the studio made $425 million off of theatrical rentals.

The result was that, judged on even the most optimistic accounting, the film only really began to make money when non-theatrical revenue streams were counted in. Of course, when they are counted in the result is clearly a healthy profit--enough for Deadline to rank the film as one of 2022's most profitable blockbusters. Still, this is not the performance Disney-Marvel probably hoped for. (Top Gun 2, and even the far more costly Avatar 2, were profitable long before the end of their theatrical runs.)

The gap between anticipations and results is especially evident when one compares Black Panther 2 to the original Black Panther. That movie, according to the same formula, was almost twice as profitable--bringing in some $476 million in profit, as against the $259 million the sequel brought in. Adjusting the figures for inflation makes the original Black Panther look better still--its $476 million in 2018 equal to about $570 million at the time of Black Panther 2's release. This leaves the second film's mass of profit less than half that of the first film, and the margin of profitability, more or less, commensurately smaller (a "cash-on-cash" return of some 53 percent for the sequel, as against 92 percent for the original). The result is that if Disney eventually made money, a good bit of it, the result still bespeaks a path of diminishing returns that may not exactly have them rushing to green-light Black Panther 3--the more in as Black Panther 2 was scarcely out of theaters before Ant-Man 3 flopped in a manner that could leave it a money-loser, even with home entertainment and the rest going some way to making up the shortfall.

The result is that, while any movie that brings in a fifty percent profit on such a colossal outlay is absolutely no flop, it was very far from being an unmitigated success--the word "disappointment" likely not inappropriate. Meanwhile, beyond Black Panther 2 it seems to say a lot that even with streaming proving no substitute for the box office (as the retreat from high spending on for-streaming content reminds us) movies are now routinely budgeted at such a level that even movies ranking among the biggest hits fail to make back their money from ticket-buyers alone. One can take it as suggestive of the decadence of the blockbuster model, just like what we had with musicals in the ‘60s--with no successor in sight.