The Superhero Flops Pile Up--as the Musical Flops Did a Half Century Ago

Looking at the superhero films of this year one may note that Ant-Man 3 underperformed, but the domestic drop was actually mild (about a sixth from the prior film's gross)--the bigger factors in perceptions of the film's performance the very front-loaded holiday weekend and the exaggerated expectations for what making it the start of Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) would do to boost the film relative to the prior Ant-Mans; and where the more serious shortfall in the international gross was at issue, the way the film fell flat in China (where Marvel generally, and Ant-Man 2 specifically, had done well). Shazam 2 really did do badly, but was also a relatively limited follow-up to an at best minor success, and so chancy from the start, with the same going for Blue Beetle--an originally straight-to-streaming project upgraded to theatrical release that failed to justify the gamble (commercially, anyway, even if there did seem to be some genuine liking for the film among those who bothered to show). Additionally Guardians of the Galaxy 3, if it opened disappointingly (by the standards of $100 million+ openers, at any rate), had the benefit of good holds that in the end will probably leave it, if a confirmation of the MCU's trend toward declining grosses, still one of the year's more profitable films.

The result is that looking at those movies one can see room for argument about how superhero films are doing. By contrast The Flash was an undeniable catastrophe, with this major, height of summer-released DCEU film about a core Justice League member performing in a way that would have been troubling even for a Shazam film--this movie that cost $300 million taking in under $300 million globally.

Now Captain Marvel 2, as of its third weekend in release, looks as if it will end up doing worse. And the first tracking data-based forecast from Boxoffice Pro for Aquaman 2 suggests the film will do no better than those two predecessors.

Considering the prospect of these three massive superhero films becoming flops on a historic scale (each perhaps registering a loss in the $100 million+ range, and perhaps much more) in just a little over six months' time puts me in mind of 1969--the year when the underperformance of three big-budget musicals (Sweet Charity, Paint Your Wagon, Hello Dolly!) proved a turning point for Hollywood, ending its fantasy of having another Sound of Music-level success. Musicals still got made, but they were no longer the mainstay of the box office they once had been--and in spite of scoring hits once a while, never truly recovered.

Again, Hollywood does not turn on a dime, the release schedule typically lagging the decision to greenlight a movie by a couple of years (more than that these days, with all the pandemic and strike-related disruptions), such that more superhero movies will be coming our way because the project is already in production, pre-production or otherwise underway; while as yet I have seen no evidence that Disney or the WBD are at all capable of shifting tracks. Quite the contrary, troubled as the MCU is it may actually be Disney's strongest earner these days (with Star Wars all but moribund, with any schemes it had for Indiana Jones fallen flat, with its animated productions doing so badly that the commercially marginal Elemental is its closest thing to a success since before the pandemic); while the WBD would seem to have little to keep it going but the fantasy that an overhauled DCEU will let it beat Disney-Marvel at its own game. Still, supertanker-slow as shifting a studio might be, and stubborn and stupid as the studios' management may be, the studios, already very badly battered at this point (by overinvestment in streaming, by the pandemic, by rising interest rates, etc.), can only take so much more in the way of losses--and eventually they will have to change their current course, however hard it may be to picture that change, or the result's appearance.