Madame Web's Second Weekend

Following its underwhelming Valentine's Day debut Boxoffice Pro predicted a 59 percent drop in box office gross for Madame Web from its first weekend to its second, leaving it with about $6.3 million collected and a total of $35.5 million in the till after twelve days.

This was pretty close to what happened, the movie dropping 61 percent and taking in $6 million--rather than surprising the pessimists with a strong hold as it went on to redeem itself Elemental-style, or a dramatically worse-than-expected hold driving home the sense of catastrophic failure, instead simply living down to the low expectations for a film already deemed a franchise-ending flop.

Interestingly this is all as the box office shows signs of life, with the Bob Marley musical biopic the strongest earner 2024 has produced so far--while once again Japanese imports, particularly of the animated kind, score according to their more modest standard, the new Demon Slayer release living up to expectations with a gross of almost $12 million. Still, for the time being it seems unlikely that February 2024 will come close to matching the box office gross of February 2023, testifying to the generally depressed condition of the market, a significant part of the story of which is the extreme difference between Madame Web (12 days on, still a long way from the $50 million mark) and Ant-Man 3--which, for all the grumbling at the time, was a $200 million+ hit of the kind Disney-Marvel and everyone else only wish they had now. (What a difference a year makes.)