My Posts on Madame Web's Box Office Performance (Collected)

During the run-up to and aftermath of the release of Madame Web I tracked the discussion of the movie's box office prospects, and then its actual theatrical performance, as well as the fallout therefrom. For convenience's sake I have gathered together the items (some of them fairly short) on this one page, in order of appearance and dated--while also updating the links from posts referencing them so that they all lead here.

1/19/24
BoxOffice Pro's Prediction for Madame Web is Out (and Not Looking Good)
Boxoffice Pro has produced its first long-range projection for Madame Web. Right now their tracking-based estimate is that the movie will open to $25-$35 million and have a final North American gross in the $56-$101 million range.

This is a long way from the openings for other Valentine's Day weekend superhero releases like Black Panther (a whopping $202 million in just its first three days of the long weekend in 2018) or Deadpool ($132 million in 2016). It's even a long way from what the much-maligned Ben Affleck-starring Daredevil scored two highly inflationary decades ago (pulling in $40 million on the same weekend back in 2003, which is equal to $67 million today)--and one might add, the success of its fellow Sony Spider-Man Universe (SSU) franchise Venom (whose second film's $90 million opening back in late 2021 was a milestone in the box office's post-pandemic recovery).

Still, this is a relatively low-budgeted film about a comparatively obscure character put out there in a time of declining, not rising, prospects for the genre, without a particular hook or gimmick (Deadpool's beat-the-audience-over-the-head-with-its-obnoxious-postmodernism, the political claims made for Black Panther, etc.), with all that implies for what constitute reasonable expectations. (Indeed, looking at the numbers and the rest I find myself thinking of how Madame Web compares to the comparably priced and better-known Batgirl--which, of course, the WBD decided not to release in the end, apparently in favor of taking the tax break.) It does not help that the movie seems to have got off on the wrong foot publicity-wise--the consequences of which The Marvels made all too clear last year.

The result is that Madame Web having a box office performance in the vicinity of Blue Beetle or The Marvels seems eminently plausible--while I have a far easier time picturing the movie doing worse than doing much better than what BoxOffice Pro projects, something to keep in mind as they update their projection over the coming weeks.

2/2/24
Madame Web's Boxoffice Pro Forecast, Updated
The week's Boxoffice Pro long-range box office forecast is out--with bad news for Madame Web. The already low expectations for its opening have fallen further--from a weak $25-$35 million over Valentine's Day weekend to a weaker $20-$29 million. In the process the $100 million bar that Boxoffice Pro calculated as within the range of the possible two weeks ago has just edged out of reach--a fairly impressive multiplier (3.5+) required to get the movie anywhere near that from the opening now projected for it.

Alas, a drop like this in the weeks before the movie's release often goes with the actual release being worse. At the moment I have little inclination to speculate too precisely--but I can fairly easily picture the movie falling short of $50 million in the worst-case scenario, rather more easily than I can picture it breaking the $100 million barrier at this point.

Hollywood has had a lousy few months since Barbie and Oppenheimer finished their parts in bucking up its performance, and is heading into a year for which expectations are muted relative even to an ultimately underwhelming 2023 (already followed by an underwhelming January 2024)--and this particular film will not do much to improve the prospect.

2/15/24
Madame Web's Projection Slips Again
NOTE: I was delayed in putting this one up, but as it was already written and relevant to the more current post put up today, here it is.

Boxoffice Pro's first published long-range forecast for Madame Web (January 18) had the movie making $25-$35 million over the three-day Friday-to-Sunday period of Valentine's Day weekend--a far cry from not just what a Black Panther or a Deadpool made over the same time frame, but even what Daredevil did back in 2003.

The figure was already clearly slipping a week ago (February 1) with a $25-$35 million projection down to $20-$29 million last week.

Now (February 8) the projection is down to $15-$24 million--a 30 to 40 percent slippage of the range as a whole from what had initially been expected. The projection for the overall gross of the film has fallen with it, though not by as much. From $56-$101 million it has fallen to $42-$78 million.

This will, of course, be the publication's long-range forecast, the movie to be covered by the weekend forecast next week, as that is when it will actually hit theaters. But given the trend of prior weeks it seems plausible that there will be at least a little more slippage--and as I have often found, when the forecast keeps falling, there is a fair chance that the movie will do even less well than the bottom range of the forecast. (Recall, for instance, Expendables 4--a movie to which Madame Web seems a lot closer in level of anticipation and prospects than even last year's superhero flops.)

The result is that at this stage of things I think the film will be doing well even to gross $15 million, and would be much more surprised if it broke the $50 million mark than if it finished its run under it.

2/15/24
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.

2/20/24
Madame Web's Opening Weekend: A Few Thoughts
Boxoffice Pro's first long-range forecast for Madame Web anticipated a three-day (Friday-to-Sunday) gross in the $25-$35 million range.

Over the following four weeks the figure dropped repeatedly to more like $14-$20 million on the day of release--a forty percent fall. Meanwhile the film's six-day gross between its Valentine's Day release (February 14) and the conclusion of the four-day President's Day weekend (February 19) looked as if it would fall short of the bottom end of that initial projection for just the three-day period.

As it happened this was pretty close to the actual course of the debut. Over the Friday-to-Sunday period Madame Web pulled in about $15 million, and $26 million over the whole six day period.

For comparison purposes, Ant-Man 3 made $120 million in just the Friday-to-Monday period on this same weekend back in 2023--five times as much.

That film, considerably better-received than Madame Web, saw its legs buckle very quickly, the movie grossing 56 percent of its entire take by President's Day. Especially in light of its even longer opening (six days instead of four) and word-of-mouth being so unlikely to save this one (the Rotten Tomatoes score that was so appallingly low last week has actually fallen further), I do not expect this movie to do much better than that--with the result that (again) I would be very surprised if it got very far past $50 million--much more so than if it fell short of $50 million.*

The story hardly seems following much further than that--but there does seem to me something worth saying about the remarks of the critics, specifically their function of damage control reminiscent of what we saw with Captain Marvel 2. "Yes," they say, "this movie is a failure, and not simply because of Russian robots and trolls and so forth, but because it is just not a very good movie. And yes, we've had a lot of this with superhero movies lately. So those studios had better get their act together and make better superhero movies."

Pay special attention to that last part: those studios had better get their act together and make better superhero movies. Such remarks have as their function heading off any suggestion that the situation has anything to do with a genre that has been exploited very intensively for a very long time being run down by this point ("I Don't Wanna Hear About No Superhero Fatigue!"), let alone the model of filmmaking by which Hollywood has lived so long being in crisis--just the studios getting complacent, sloppy, flabby. They just need to get off the couch and diet and get back in shape!

As I have argued again and again, I see abundant reason to think the trouble goes way, way deeper than that. But just as the claqueurs will not tell the public that, the courtiers to the Hollywood elite will not tell their patrons that. The question, then, is whether that elite is intelligent enough not to trust its sycophants.

Alas, "intelligent" and "Hollywood" have not deservedly been spoken in the same sentence very much for a very long time--all as, sadly, the culture of the elite C. Wright Mills described so well favors always speaking "to the well-blunted point" and "soften[ing] the facts into the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view," rather than facing the facts and thinking hard about how to really deal with them, with results we see all around us every day in this Age of Polycrisis. Hollywood shows no sign of being an exception to that unhappy pattern.

* Last week the critics' score was 18 percent; now it is 12 percent. Meanwhile the audience score is 56 percent. By comparison Ant-Man 3's less than brilliant scores were 46 and 82 percent, respectively.

2/27/24
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.)

4/7/24
Checking in with Madame Web
Madame Web came out over Valentine's/President's Day weekend to a very weak, if not really worse than expected, audience response.

How do things stand now?

The film, which was in 27th place at the box office on the weekend of March 22-24, finished up well short of the $50 million mark domestically (under $44 million actually), and did not do much better internationally--pulling in just under $56 million there, to leave its global total a bit below $100 million at last report from Box Office Mojo. It is not inconceivable that the movie will somehow make the remaining $800,000 or so to break the $100 million barrier, and thus technically be a "$100 million hit," but that just does not mean what it used to--especially for a franchise superhero film, and at that, one from the Spider-Man universe.

One may add to this that the film's audience scores are 57 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 2.6 on Internet Movie Data Base.

The result is that in contrast with those role films that manage to triumph over a poor start (like last year's Elemental), this movie's flop status still stands--and shows every sign of continuing to stand, with all that implies for any schemes for spinning off other movies from this one, the Sony Spider-Man Universe that already took a hit rather than scored one with 2022's Morbius, every other scheme for squeezing more money out of audiences through the use of less well-known superheroes in lower-key films, and the superhero genre generally, though of course, a good many such efforts are doubtless locked in, and the fact remains that Hollywood has no plans for what to do with itself as its longstanding model of filmmaking becomes untenable. Except, perhaps, to bet on mighty Artificial Intelligences somehow coming to its rescue, the same as the rest of the business community these days (no matter how much certain billionaires would have us believe otherwise as they flog silly Frankenstein complex stuff on TV).