The Mounting List of Flops in the Summer of 2023

As it is already July it does not seem unreasonable to stop and consider the course of the box office this summer.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3, despite the deflation of expectations and a weaker-than-hoped-for debut, managed an $850 million global total--in real terms a decline from its predecessors, but a relatively better performance than the preceding Marvel Cinematic Universe films, and quite enough to make it one of the more profitable films of the year. Meanwhile the sequel to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has nearly doubled the original film's domestic gross, while if the international audience is less enthusiastic it is still improving its totals on the first film there as well.

By contrast the other big movies of the summer seem to all be performing somewhere between badly and disastrously. Thus does it go with Fast X, Transformers, The Flash--each of which could well mean a nine-figure loss for their studio. And now Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is at this point performing no better.

Meanwhile, along with the big action movies the family-oriented animated films, and adaptations of animated films, are suffering--as seen with The Little Mermaid, Elemental, and now something called Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken as well.

Considering this let us allow that every summer has its flops. But the ratio of flops-to-successes, the severity of the flops (as with The Flash), and the qualified nature of such successes as we are seeing (Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is at the least an underperformer when graded on anything but a curve), is really something special, with the big-picture numbers confirming the fact. While this is the first summer since 2019 with a "normal" slate of films, when we adjust the grosses for inflation the overall domestic box office take for May and June is down not just from the 2015-2019 average, but the depressed level of last summer as well (reversing the upward trend seen in January-April).

No matter how loud the claqueurs claque they cannot conceal the fact that things are not going well--and I have little expectation of them getting better this season given that the summer has already given us its "best shot," while the prospects of the most promising movies coming out later this summer, and this year, seem either very finite (as with Mission: Impossible 7, about which Boxoffice Pro is already becoming less bullish), or very shaky indeed (as with Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman 2), with all this going for the foreign markets as for the United States.

Indeed, considering the situation I recall my suggestion in the first week of May that no live-action movie coming out this year will make a billion dollars. Right now I feel more confirmed in that assessment that ever--and its implications for the beleaguered film industry.