Madame Web: The Opening Weekend Forecast From Boxoffice Pro

Madame Web hit theaters Valentine's Day. Right now Boxoffice Pro, the projections from which continue to edge down in the way seen over the last two weeks, have the movie making $14 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period, and a mere $20 million in its first five days of release. A drop even from the $15-$24 million the publication projected for the Friday-to-Sunday period last week, it seems to me that the movie will have a tough time getting to the $50 million mark, let alone up over it--the more in as I see little evidence that word-of-mouth will save this movie. The Rotten Tomatoes score is actually 18 percent for this one--while just in case the reader buys into all the sneering about the calculation of such scores, it seems entirely consistent with the evident reaction to go by this verbal survey of their assessments, while this review over at Polygon seems representative, if also better-written, than most.)

Considering all this let us acknowledge that there is a lot less riding on the success of Madame Web than was riding on, for instance, the success of Ant-Man 3 this same weekend last year. It is a much smaller production than that $200 million spectacle, with not nearly so important a function within its franchise than the launch of the MCU's "Phase Five" that movie was accorded--all as the bar for success is a lot lower these days. (Remember, last year Ant-Man 3 was judged a flop for bringing in a bit less than a half billion dollars--while by the time Captain Marvel 2 rolled around numbers like that looked positively enviable.) Still, it will hardly be what Sony is looking to hear as it engages in what the critics are denouncing as a cynical yet incompetent attempt to create a new cinematic universe around the success of the consistently most salable superhero of all as the genre falls apart, while that seems the case simply because they seem to have lost all thought of anything but sticking with the increasingly flop-ridden path they followed in an increasingly remote heyday for the field.