The press is singing the "success" of Twisters at the box office very loudly.
But how does this compare to the reality?
In its second weekend the movie Twisters raised its total to $155 million with a $35 million Friday-to-Sunday take--a figure that works out to a 57 percent drop from the gross of the prior weekend. That is better than the 68-70 percent drops we saw for Thor 4 and Ant-Man 3, but worse than, for example, the 47 percent drop we saw for Guardians of the Galaxy 3--not disastrous, but far from great, the more in as the opening weekend was not a $100 million+ debut but took in a mere $80 million. At this rate I expect the movie to break the $200 million barrier domestically--but to fall well short of the $242 million the original Twister made in 1996, when the dollar was worth about twice what it is today, all as the movie cost about twice as much as that predecessor to make. (At the current rate of week-to-week decline think $210-$220 million when its run sputters out.)
Moreover, the film is doing a lot less well than that in the international markets. Where the 1996 movie actually made more money internationally than in North America, and that without China being the market that it still is, making for a 49/51 domestic/international split, the same split is 70/30 for the new movie. That is to say, as the movie is on its way to less than half the original's business in real terms in Hollywood's home market, that is still more than twice as much as it doing internationally. Adding it all together I see a finale in the vicinity of $300-$350 million globally as most probable for the movie--versus the $496 million Twister made in current dollars, and the billion dollars to which that is equal today.
The result is that the movie is neither living up to the original's precedent, nor a savior-of-summer caliber hit in the way that Inside Out 2 has been, and that it looks like Deadpool & Wolverine is for the time being. Indeed, given a production budget that has been estimated as being as much as $200 million at this rate the movie could lose money (maybe not Furiosa money, but still, a loss such as no studio needs ever, and especially right now).
So why does the press act as if it is doing well?
Part of the story, I think, is that the folks of the entertainment press are just not very good number-crunchers--by which I mean they never made it up to pre-algebra in the course of their mathematical educations, while they have never heard of this thing called "inflation." Part of it is that, in spite of the crowing about how great the box office is, they are still grading on the post-pandemic curve. And part of it is that they are selling a line, namely that the movie is a success, just as they told everyone Mad Max: Fury Road was a success when it was actually losing money, to some extent because they are courtiers of the industry personnel who make films, to some extent because they are groupthinkers who reflexively tell the same story as "everyone else," to some extent because there may be a little more than that going on in an age in which the entertainment news page is almost as packed with the inanities of what passes for news as the front pages of the mainstream press.
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Wednesday, July 31, 2024
Friday, May 31, 2024
What Will Inside Out 2 Make at the Box Office?
Ordinarily when I think about what a movie might make I look at comparable, prior, films. If the movie is part of a series I look at its predecessors in the same series. If movies not in the same series offer some point of comparison, I use that. (Thus did I, when thinking about Indiana Jones 5, consider what preceding Indiana Jones films made--but also how Solo did, which, alas, turned out to be far more relevant.) And so on.
It seems to me that Disney-Pixar's upcoming Inside Out 2 does not have many convenient points of comparison as the first sequel to a film put out way back in 2015. Certainly there have been other Pixar movies accorded wide theatrical releases since the pandemic's disruption of the business but the circumstances of their releases differed sufficiently to complicate the drawing of any analogy. In the summer of 2022 Lightyear appeared at a point at which there had been sufficient recovery of theatergoing for there to be reasonable hopes of a "normal" Pixar gross, but if the movie was connected with the hit Toy Story series, it was awkwardly so given its conception as a prequel about one of the characters (Lightyear a "Toy Story Story" as Solo was a "Star Wars Story"), the change of the actor voicing the lead character, the significant shift in tone--and the way in which it became an object of the culture war. Last summer's Elemental was an original film, and I think a bit "concept-heavy" in that way that works against such films being wide-audience hits, especially in the American market, so that again it has its limits as a point of comparison. Meanwhile, even looking beyond Pixar's releases to Disney's wider releases leaves us without much more given the movies it has put out (like Wish).
Still, I can think of at least one way of approaching the matter, which is to look at the closest thing to a recently productive brand like Pixar in the Disney media universe, namely the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Prior to the catastrophe that was Captain Marvel 2 the MCU movies were in real, inflation-adjusted terms making 50-80 percent of what the preceding film in the same series made (Thor 4 as against Thor 3, etc., all the way through last summer's Guardians of the Galaxy 3). Especially given the fact that North American moviegoing pretty much fell by half between 2015 and 2023-2024 this number can seem significant--and thus worth applying to Inside Out 2.
The starting point is then the gross of the first Inside Out. That movie made $356 million at the U.S. box office. Adjusted for inflation using the good old Consumer Price Index this comes to about $468 million. Some 50-80 percent of that would work out to $240-$370 million. Assuming, not unreasonably given that China was not too big a contributor to the first film, that the domestic/international balance for the sequel is the same as it was for the original this would work out to a box office range of $600-$900 million at the global level.
How does this compare with Boxoffice Pro's expectations for the opening? According to their last long-range forecast one might anticipate $80-$110 million for the debut. As it happened the first Inside Out managed to quadruple its opening over its longer run. Might this one do the same? As a brand-name sequel one can expect the run of Inside Out 2 to be more front-loaded than the first film, but at the same time it seems to me that, plausibly testifying to the moviegoing audience's greater hesitancy about the trip to the theater, on the whole film grosses may be becoming less front-loaded than before--a larger part of the public, perhaps, waiting to hear what the film is really like before checking it out for themselves.
Returning to the example of the MCU I remember how the Disney-backed "first big release" of last summer--Guardians of the Galaxy 3--did, tripling its opening weekend gross. That would give us $240-$330 million, a range with a bottom end precisely equal to the bottom end of the range I suggested above, with an upper end safely inside the range as well. The movie quadrupling its money as the first film did would work out to a gross of $320-$440 million--largely inside the range, if breaking past it at the high end. Together this comes to a domestic range of $240-$440 million at the extreme ends, and globally, $600 million to $1.1 billion.
That said I can easily see the movie making $600 million--that figure just a little better than Elemental (and the live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid) managed last summer, after all. However, the $1 billion+ gross, which far exceeds anything made by any movie since last July (when we got Barbie), would really be an achievement--more than I think plausible given the state of the market, and the strength of the preceding film, and the tripling of at least a decent open weekend rather than quadrupling it the more likely outcome. The result is that the $600-$850 million range seems to me the plausible territory for this movie--which, I am sure, would have the press crowing about a hit if the movie does indeed pull it off.
It seems to me that Disney-Pixar's upcoming Inside Out 2 does not have many convenient points of comparison as the first sequel to a film put out way back in 2015. Certainly there have been other Pixar movies accorded wide theatrical releases since the pandemic's disruption of the business but the circumstances of their releases differed sufficiently to complicate the drawing of any analogy. In the summer of 2022 Lightyear appeared at a point at which there had been sufficient recovery of theatergoing for there to be reasonable hopes of a "normal" Pixar gross, but if the movie was connected with the hit Toy Story series, it was awkwardly so given its conception as a prequel about one of the characters (Lightyear a "Toy Story Story" as Solo was a "Star Wars Story"), the change of the actor voicing the lead character, the significant shift in tone--and the way in which it became an object of the culture war. Last summer's Elemental was an original film, and I think a bit "concept-heavy" in that way that works against such films being wide-audience hits, especially in the American market, so that again it has its limits as a point of comparison. Meanwhile, even looking beyond Pixar's releases to Disney's wider releases leaves us without much more given the movies it has put out (like Wish).
Still, I can think of at least one way of approaching the matter, which is to look at the closest thing to a recently productive brand like Pixar in the Disney media universe, namely the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Prior to the catastrophe that was Captain Marvel 2 the MCU movies were in real, inflation-adjusted terms making 50-80 percent of what the preceding film in the same series made (Thor 4 as against Thor 3, etc., all the way through last summer's Guardians of the Galaxy 3). Especially given the fact that North American moviegoing pretty much fell by half between 2015 and 2023-2024 this number can seem significant--and thus worth applying to Inside Out 2.
The starting point is then the gross of the first Inside Out. That movie made $356 million at the U.S. box office. Adjusted for inflation using the good old Consumer Price Index this comes to about $468 million. Some 50-80 percent of that would work out to $240-$370 million. Assuming, not unreasonably given that China was not too big a contributor to the first film, that the domestic/international balance for the sequel is the same as it was for the original this would work out to a box office range of $600-$900 million at the global level.
How does this compare with Boxoffice Pro's expectations for the opening? According to their last long-range forecast one might anticipate $80-$110 million for the debut. As it happened the first Inside Out managed to quadruple its opening over its longer run. Might this one do the same? As a brand-name sequel one can expect the run of Inside Out 2 to be more front-loaded than the first film, but at the same time it seems to me that, plausibly testifying to the moviegoing audience's greater hesitancy about the trip to the theater, on the whole film grosses may be becoming less front-loaded than before--a larger part of the public, perhaps, waiting to hear what the film is really like before checking it out for themselves.
Returning to the example of the MCU I remember how the Disney-backed "first big release" of last summer--Guardians of the Galaxy 3--did, tripling its opening weekend gross. That would give us $240-$330 million, a range with a bottom end precisely equal to the bottom end of the range I suggested above, with an upper end safely inside the range as well. The movie quadrupling its money as the first film did would work out to a gross of $320-$440 million--largely inside the range, if breaking past it at the high end. Together this comes to a domestic range of $240-$440 million at the extreme ends, and globally, $600 million to $1.1 billion.
That said I can easily see the movie making $600 million--that figure just a little better than Elemental (and the live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid) managed last summer, after all. However, the $1 billion+ gross, which far exceeds anything made by any movie since last July (when we got Barbie), would really be an achievement--more than I think plausible given the state of the market, and the strength of the preceding film, and the tripling of at least a decent open weekend rather than quadrupling it the more likely outcome. The result is that the $600-$850 million range seems to me the plausible territory for this movie--which, I am sure, would have the press crowing about a hit if the movie does indeed pull it off.
Tuesday, May 28, 2024
Notes on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga's Opening Weekend
As compared with last summer--and even this spring--I have been paying the box office less mind as of late. Part of this has been having less data to go on since Boxoffice Pro drew back from its publication of systematic, detailed, regularly updated forecasts, but part of it has been that in the main it is the same story over and over again--the contraction of the American box office, the sharply fallen returns on Hollywood's longtime box office strategy. And even where that story is concerned it seems that the early summer releases from which little was ever expected--The Fall Guy movie, the Planet of the Apes sequel no one ever asked for, etc.--mean little next to the bigger releases coming only relatively late in this season--with Inside Out 2 (due out only June 14!) generally considered the first.
Still, the discussion of the opening of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga got my attention. In spite of the bizarre talking up of the prior Mad Max movie as if it were some kind of record-crusher it was a merely respectable performer even by pre-pandemic standards--just #21 on the list of the year's domestic and worldwide grossers according to Box Office Mojo--and frankly a weak one given the reported $150 million production budget (reflected in the movie's reportedly losing money). It was not an obviously logical business decision to continue the saga from there, let alone do that in the form of a prequel to a character who is not the actual Mad Max (the strategy not of a main line Star Wars film but a Solo) put out a decade after that marginal performance with a different lead. Even if the movie was green-lit without the benefit of knowledge of how tough the market would become that ought to have been restrained expectations for it even pre-pandemic ought to have been lower still by mid-2024.
Considering the figures one may as well start with how Mad Max: Fury Road really did. That movie opened to $45 million over three days in 2015--the equivalent of $60 million in mid-2024 terms when adjusted for inflation. In fairness the box office-watchers expected less than that, about $40-$50 million in the first three days, and just $45-$55 million over the four day Friday-to-Monday Memorial Day weekend period. Still, anyone with a sense of how box office grosses have declined in the last few years (as the frequency of moviegoing practically halved) might suspect that a mere 16 to 33 percent real drop they projected was still on the optimistic side. Consider, for example, how even before the debacle of Captain Marvel 2 the Marvel Cinematic Universe's films (from Thor 4 to Guardians of the Galaxy 3) were doing just 50-80 percent of the business of the preceding films in their series'--a proportion which works out less to $40-$50 million than $30-$50 million, even with what was then, and even now remains, a stronger brand than Mad Max is in 2024. And indeed even the $30 million was more than the film took in over its three day period, its take just $25 million--while the fourth day does not get it much past the $30 million mark (at last report, just $31 million).
The obvious conclusion is that, even if expectations are lower than they were before, they still have not fallen anywhere near enough to give the professional box office-watchers a really realistic sense of just what the market is like now. Will they learn?
I wouldn't hold my breath--the more in as so much of what passes for analysis is mere claquing.
Still, the discussion of the opening of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga got my attention. In spite of the bizarre talking up of the prior Mad Max movie as if it were some kind of record-crusher it was a merely respectable performer even by pre-pandemic standards--just #21 on the list of the year's domestic and worldwide grossers according to Box Office Mojo--and frankly a weak one given the reported $150 million production budget (reflected in the movie's reportedly losing money). It was not an obviously logical business decision to continue the saga from there, let alone do that in the form of a prequel to a character who is not the actual Mad Max (the strategy not of a main line Star Wars film but a Solo) put out a decade after that marginal performance with a different lead. Even if the movie was green-lit without the benefit of knowledge of how tough the market would become that ought to have been restrained expectations for it even pre-pandemic ought to have been lower still by mid-2024.
Considering the figures one may as well start with how Mad Max: Fury Road really did. That movie opened to $45 million over three days in 2015--the equivalent of $60 million in mid-2024 terms when adjusted for inflation. In fairness the box office-watchers expected less than that, about $40-$50 million in the first three days, and just $45-$55 million over the four day Friday-to-Monday Memorial Day weekend period. Still, anyone with a sense of how box office grosses have declined in the last few years (as the frequency of moviegoing practically halved) might suspect that a mere 16 to 33 percent real drop they projected was still on the optimistic side. Consider, for example, how even before the debacle of Captain Marvel 2 the Marvel Cinematic Universe's films (from Thor 4 to Guardians of the Galaxy 3) were doing just 50-80 percent of the business of the preceding films in their series'--a proportion which works out less to $40-$50 million than $30-$50 million, even with what was then, and even now remains, a stronger brand than Mad Max is in 2024. And indeed even the $30 million was more than the film took in over its three day period, its take just $25 million--while the fourth day does not get it much past the $30 million mark (at last report, just $31 million).
The obvious conclusion is that, even if expectations are lower than they were before, they still have not fallen anywhere near enough to give the professional box office-watchers a really realistic sense of just what the market is like now. Will they learn?
I wouldn't hold my breath--the more in as so much of what passes for analysis is mere claquing.
Sunday, April 7, 2024
Our First Non-Superhero Summer Movie Season Kickoff Since 2006
Surveying those films that launched the hugely important summer movie season over the course of the twenty-first century one finds that it is not only the case that nearly every first weekend of that season since 2008 has been launched by a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film (beginning with that year's Iron Man), with this the case for each and every proper summer season since 2015.* It is also the case that since 2002 just about every summer movie season was launched by a Marvel superhero epic--with the Spider-Man (2002, 2004, 2007) and X-Men (2003) movies arrived before the MCU came along, and filling in the gaps in most of those rare years after Iron Man when there was no MCU film scheduled for that weekend (2009, 2014).**
It was an extraordinary run testifying to the extraordinary popularity not just of the MCU, but the broader Marvel brand, and the superhero film generally.
Of course, 2024 will not be seeing an MCU, or any Marvel or even superhero, release on the first weekend of summer. Instead the season will open with . . . The Fall Guy.
This may seem just a blip. After all, Captain America 4 was supposed to open that critical first weekend, but this was made impossible by last year's double-strike by Hollywood's actors and writers. However, it is also the case that the MCU, and the superhero genre more broadly, have had a very rough year and a half at this point, with Marvel's Phase Four clearly troubled by the time of Thor 4 (from which point on sequels were making 20 to 50 percent less in real terms than the films which preceded them), and Captain Marvel 2 proved a catastrophe, its global gross ultimately a mere 15 percent that of the original. As the situation stands, Disney-Marvel may still plan to have The Thunderbolts, at least, out on May 2, 2025, and may still succeed in doing that--but barring a turnaround in the fortunes of the franchise and the genre the results will only testify to the passing of their old market dominance.
* The films are, respectively, Iron Man) (2008) and its two sequels (2010, 2013), the first Thor movie (2011), the third Captain America movie (2016), the four Avengers films (2012, 2015, 2018, 2019), the second and third Guardians of the Galaxy movies (2017, 2023), and Dr. Strange 2 (2022). (Where the exceptional 2020-2021 period is concerned it is worth remembering that Black Widow was scheduled for the first weekend of May 2020, and delayed only by the pandemic, which had a sufficiently distorting effect on the summer of 2021 that the author of this post also does not count it as a "proper" summer.)
** The films in question were X-Men: Wolverine in 2009 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014. The sole years in which this did not occur were 2005 and 2006 (kicked off by Ridley Scott's historical epic Kingdom of Heaven, and Mission: Impossible III, respectively, both significant disappointments that ultimately underlined just how important the superhero film was to become in this period).
It was an extraordinary run testifying to the extraordinary popularity not just of the MCU, but the broader Marvel brand, and the superhero film generally.
Of course, 2024 will not be seeing an MCU, or any Marvel or even superhero, release on the first weekend of summer. Instead the season will open with . . . The Fall Guy.
This may seem just a blip. After all, Captain America 4 was supposed to open that critical first weekend, but this was made impossible by last year's double-strike by Hollywood's actors and writers. However, it is also the case that the MCU, and the superhero genre more broadly, have had a very rough year and a half at this point, with Marvel's Phase Four clearly troubled by the time of Thor 4 (from which point on sequels were making 20 to 50 percent less in real terms than the films which preceded them), and Captain Marvel 2 proved a catastrophe, its global gross ultimately a mere 15 percent that of the original. As the situation stands, Disney-Marvel may still plan to have The Thunderbolts, at least, out on May 2, 2025, and may still succeed in doing that--but barring a turnaround in the fortunes of the franchise and the genre the results will only testify to the passing of their old market dominance.
* The films are, respectively, Iron Man) (2008) and its two sequels (2010, 2013), the first Thor movie (2011), the third Captain America movie (2016), the four Avengers films (2012, 2015, 2018, 2019), the second and third Guardians of the Galaxy movies (2017, 2023), and Dr. Strange 2 (2022). (Where the exceptional 2020-2021 period is concerned it is worth remembering that Black Widow was scheduled for the first weekend of May 2020, and delayed only by the pandemic, which had a sufficiently distorting effect on the summer of 2021 that the author of this post also does not count it as a "proper" summer.)
** The films in question were X-Men: Wolverine in 2009 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014. The sole years in which this did not occur were 2005 and 2006 (kicked off by Ridley Scott's historical epic Kingdom of Heaven, and Mission: Impossible III, respectively, both significant disappointments that ultimately underlined just how important the superhero film was to become in this period).
Friday, January 19, 2024
In the End, Just How Did Captain Marvel 2 Do at the Box Office?
According to Variety The Marvels is now available on Apple+ and Amazon Prime--scarcely two months after it hit theaters.
How has the movie fared up to now? Going by the pattern I had seen with the preceding four Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films I had noticed that their global grosses dropped 20 to 50 percent in inflation-adjusted terms relative to the prior film in their series (Thor 4 vs. Thor 3, etc.). Out of that lot Captain Marvel 2 seemed most comparable to Black Panther 2 (as a movie that, following up a sequel released near the peak of excitement about the MCU, and paralleling it in other ways, and which enjoyed exceptional success accordingly) its drop would be nearer the high end of the range--so I guessed that, given the $1.4 billion to which the first Captain Marvel's gross ($1.13 billion) amounted in mid-2023 dollars, the final take would be in the range of $600-$700 million.
Of course, the year went on becoming less and less kind to franchise films like this one at the box office--and a lot went wrong for The Marvels, not least the promotion proving exceptionally weak (unhelped by lackluster trailers). The result was that tracking-based estimates a month before the movie's release suggested something far lower--Boxoffice Pro projecting a domestic gross in the $120-$190 million range, from which I extapolated a global gross in the $250-$500 million range. Alas, over that remaining month this already low expectation all but collapsed, with not just the $190 million looking less and less likely, but even the $120 million, which came to look like ceiling rather than floor for the range with Boxoffice Pro's last long-range forecast lowering the estimate to $85-$125 million.
As it happened, the movie made just under $85 million in North America at last check (roughly equal to what the first Captain Marvel had made only partway through the film's second day in release)--and another $121 million globally, leaving it with a total of $206 million grossed (about equal to what the first movie made in North America in about its first week).*
This was a fall not of 50 percent, but of 85 percent, an absolutely catastrophic collapse that had the movie grossing less than even the notoriously catastrophic The Flash. Indeed, to call The Marvels the Solo of the Marvel Cinematic Universe can seem to understate the disaster. (After all, that movie made almost $400 million back in the summer of 2018, which is more like a half billion today--the kind of sum that Marvel can only fantasize this one made, much as they would have seen that as a grave disappointment.)
This does not guarantee the movie the top spot in Deadline's inevitable list of the year's worst flops--but I think it safe to expect it still making the top five, even in this wretched year.
* The original Captain Marvel collected $115 million by the end of Saturday, and $215 million in the first eight days of its North American run--without adjustment for inflation (in which case the figures become $139 million and $259 million, respectively).
How has the movie fared up to now? Going by the pattern I had seen with the preceding four Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films I had noticed that their global grosses dropped 20 to 50 percent in inflation-adjusted terms relative to the prior film in their series (Thor 4 vs. Thor 3, etc.). Out of that lot Captain Marvel 2 seemed most comparable to Black Panther 2 (as a movie that, following up a sequel released near the peak of excitement about the MCU, and paralleling it in other ways, and which enjoyed exceptional success accordingly) its drop would be nearer the high end of the range--so I guessed that, given the $1.4 billion to which the first Captain Marvel's gross ($1.13 billion) amounted in mid-2023 dollars, the final take would be in the range of $600-$700 million.
Of course, the year went on becoming less and less kind to franchise films like this one at the box office--and a lot went wrong for The Marvels, not least the promotion proving exceptionally weak (unhelped by lackluster trailers). The result was that tracking-based estimates a month before the movie's release suggested something far lower--Boxoffice Pro projecting a domestic gross in the $120-$190 million range, from which I extapolated a global gross in the $250-$500 million range. Alas, over that remaining month this already low expectation all but collapsed, with not just the $190 million looking less and less likely, but even the $120 million, which came to look like ceiling rather than floor for the range with Boxoffice Pro's last long-range forecast lowering the estimate to $85-$125 million.
As it happened, the movie made just under $85 million in North America at last check (roughly equal to what the first Captain Marvel had made only partway through the film's second day in release)--and another $121 million globally, leaving it with a total of $206 million grossed (about equal to what the first movie made in North America in about its first week).*
This does not guarantee the movie the top spot in Deadline's inevitable list of the year's worst flops--but I think it safe to expect it still making the top five, even in this wretched year.
* The original Captain Marvel collected $115 million by the end of Saturday, and $215 million in the first eight days of its North American run--without adjustment for inflation (in which case the figures become $139 million and $259 million, respectively).
Tuesday, January 16, 2024
What Will Deadpool 3 Make at the Box Office? (A Very Tentative Prediction for Entertainment Purposes Only)
The past year has been a more than usually chaotic one for film release schedules, given the disruption of Hollywood's first "double strike" (by both the actors and writers) since 1960, compelling the delay of work on a good many movie productions to the point of bumping their release dates from 2024 into 2025.
One result is that while this year will, as usual, have plenty of superhero stuff and even Marvel stuff (particularly Spider-Man-related stuff, like Madame Web, Venom 3, Kraven the Hunter, milking that most consistently successful franchise), there will only be one proper Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) release, Deadpool 3.
How well can we expect it to do?
For a start, we can look at how past Deadpool films have done.
The first Deadpool movie made $363 million domestically, and a total of $782 million worldwide, back in 2016--which works out to a $470 million hit at home, and a billion-dollar global gross when we adjust for December 2023 prices (a feat the more impressive because there was no Chinese release).
The second Deadpool movie made just a little less--$318 million domestically, $735 million globally, or in December 2023 prices, about $387 million domestically and just under $900 million globally.
Thinking in terms of the average of the two films we would get a gross of $430 million domestically, and around $950 million globally--sensational numbers. If we instead see the trend of decline suggested by the drop in gross from the first film to the second continue we can, anticipating a Deadpool 2-like drop from its predecessor, picture the movie making over $300 million+ domestically, and $800 million globally. This is less sensational, but still very, very good for a Deadpool movie--and indeed way better than what one can expect for a superhero movie, a Marvel movie, a franchise movie after the disastrous year of 2023.
That said, let us look at those expectations more closely. While the tendency toward franchise films in the superhero, spy-fi and associated genres crashing and burning has been broadly evident across Hollywood's output (the DCEU suffered, too, and so did Indiana Jones, and the Fast and Furious, and Mission: Impossible), to the point of making the kind of collapse that Solo represented for the Star Wars series now routine, let us focus in on the MCU specifically. Marvel's late Phase Four and early Phase Five films (from Thor 4 through Guardians of the Galaxy 3) showed 20 to 50 percent drops in their global grosses compared with the immediate predecessors in their series'. Already bad enough in itself, Captain Marvel 2 (aka The Marvels), which has pretty much finished its run with $200 million in the till (against the $1.1 billion the original picked up in 2019), saw an even worse 85 percent collapse (after adjustment for inflation).
A 20 to 50 percent collapse from Deadpool 2's gross would leave the movie with about $450-$700 million worldwide--which graded on the curve most now seem to be using would not be too bad (especially at the high end of the range). A Captain Marvel 2-like 85 percent collapse would leave it with just $150 million in the till, which would be a new low for the battered MCU.
For now these two figures--$150 million and $700 million--seem to me to represent the most extreme possibilities. I do not, at this point, see reason to think Deadpool 3 will suffer as badly as Captain Marvel 2 did. After all, even Aquaman 2, for all its troubles, is doing considerably better, showing that even now $200 million is not the ceiling for such films (Aquaman 2, flop that it may be, is on its way to grossing twice that), and Captain Marvel 2 had a very great deal working against it (production delays, an awkward tie-in with small-screen Marvel, rather weak early promotion, a sharp change in tone from the predecessor, etc.), more than Deadpool probably will.
At the same time I know no reason to think that Deadpool will manage to go very far in bucking the broader trend. The first movie, and even the second, seemed to command some real affection from fans, who may be more willing to give a new Deadpool movie a chance than other "usual" Marvel releases, but this sequel will still be hitting theaters six years after the last film (which itself, again, had shown some evidences of the fan base's erosion), in a time in which Marvel is looking very tarnished indeed and superhero fatigue is not so easily denied as the claqueurs would have us believe. The result is that, with the release still four months off and a lot possibly happening between now and then I find myself looking toward the middle of the range I have cited above--between the relatively slight Guardians of the Galaxy drop, and the extreme Captain Marvel drop. The result is that, for the time being, the safest guess seems to be that the movie's gross will be in the $400-$450 million range (while I would add that given the trend of things it is easier to see the movie doing worse than better).
One result is that while this year will, as usual, have plenty of superhero stuff and even Marvel stuff (particularly Spider-Man-related stuff, like Madame Web, Venom 3, Kraven the Hunter, milking that most consistently successful franchise), there will only be one proper Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) release, Deadpool 3.
How well can we expect it to do?
For a start, we can look at how past Deadpool films have done.
The first Deadpool movie made $363 million domestically, and a total of $782 million worldwide, back in 2016--which works out to a $470 million hit at home, and a billion-dollar global gross when we adjust for December 2023 prices (a feat the more impressive because there was no Chinese release).
The second Deadpool movie made just a little less--$318 million domestically, $735 million globally, or in December 2023 prices, about $387 million domestically and just under $900 million globally.
Thinking in terms of the average of the two films we would get a gross of $430 million domestically, and around $950 million globally--sensational numbers. If we instead see the trend of decline suggested by the drop in gross from the first film to the second continue we can, anticipating a Deadpool 2-like drop from its predecessor, picture the movie making over $300 million+ domestically, and $800 million globally. This is less sensational, but still very, very good for a Deadpool movie--and indeed way better than what one can expect for a superhero movie, a Marvel movie, a franchise movie after the disastrous year of 2023.
That said, let us look at those expectations more closely. While the tendency toward franchise films in the superhero, spy-fi and associated genres crashing and burning has been broadly evident across Hollywood's output (the DCEU suffered, too, and so did Indiana Jones, and the Fast and Furious, and Mission: Impossible), to the point of making the kind of collapse that Solo represented for the Star Wars series now routine, let us focus in on the MCU specifically. Marvel's late Phase Four and early Phase Five films (from Thor 4 through Guardians of the Galaxy 3) showed 20 to 50 percent drops in their global grosses compared with the immediate predecessors in their series'. Already bad enough in itself, Captain Marvel 2 (aka The Marvels), which has pretty much finished its run with $200 million in the till (against the $1.1 billion the original picked up in 2019), saw an even worse 85 percent collapse (after adjustment for inflation).
A 20 to 50 percent collapse from Deadpool 2's gross would leave the movie with about $450-$700 million worldwide--which graded on the curve most now seem to be using would not be too bad (especially at the high end of the range). A Captain Marvel 2-like 85 percent collapse would leave it with just $150 million in the till, which would be a new low for the battered MCU.
For now these two figures--$150 million and $700 million--seem to me to represent the most extreme possibilities. I do not, at this point, see reason to think Deadpool 3 will suffer as badly as Captain Marvel 2 did. After all, even Aquaman 2, for all its troubles, is doing considerably better, showing that even now $200 million is not the ceiling for such films (Aquaman 2, flop that it may be, is on its way to grossing twice that), and Captain Marvel 2 had a very great deal working against it (production delays, an awkward tie-in with small-screen Marvel, rather weak early promotion, a sharp change in tone from the predecessor, etc.), more than Deadpool probably will.
At the same time I know no reason to think that Deadpool will manage to go very far in bucking the broader trend. The first movie, and even the second, seemed to command some real affection from fans, who may be more willing to give a new Deadpool movie a chance than other "usual" Marvel releases, but this sequel will still be hitting theaters six years after the last film (which itself, again, had shown some evidences of the fan base's erosion), in a time in which Marvel is looking very tarnished indeed and superhero fatigue is not so easily denied as the claqueurs would have us believe. The result is that, with the release still four months off and a lot possibly happening between now and then I find myself looking toward the middle of the range I have cited above--between the relatively slight Guardians of the Galaxy drop, and the extreme Captain Marvel drop. The result is that, for the time being, the safest guess seems to be that the movie's gross will be in the $400-$450 million range (while I would add that given the trend of things it is easier to see the movie doing worse than better).
The 2023 Box Office in Review
Back in 2023, looking at the prior year's track record with qualified successes such as Venom and No Time to Die, and the indisputable blockbuster that was Spider-Man: No Way Home; and the current year's Top Gun 2, Avatar 2 and Marvel films (Dr. Strange 2, Thor 4, Black Panther 2, which if suggestive of Marvel being past its peak still took in $1.2 billion domestically); it seemed to me that the box office was returning to its pre-pandemic norm, more or less--that people were for the most part going to the movies again in the same fashion as before, to see essentially the same films as before, to go by how the big franchise films led the way, and indeed claimed an even larger share of the box office gross than they had prior to the pandemic. Indeed, it seemed to me that if the real box office gross in 2022 was not much more than half the norm for the years 2015-2019 (about 54-55 percent of the figure) this was a matter of the release slate in 2022 being relatively thin, with 2023's being packed with blockbusters likely to take the box office the rest of the way back to the pre-pandemic average, or close to it.*
Alas, 2023 proved a big surprise that way. Yes, the recovery continued, but only to a very limited extent, the gross, adjusted for inflation, a little less than two-thirds of the 2015-2019 average; with this connected to the way that those big franchise films that had led the recovery through late 2021 and 2022 began to consistently disappoint.** Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was only a slight underperformer that will, in the end, be one of the year's bigger successes--but movies like The Flash, Indiana Jones 5, Captain Marvel 2, Aquaman 2 put in performances that, from the perspective of their franchises, were the equivalent of Solo: A Star Wars Story's crashing and burning back in the summer of 2018, while other films like Fast and Furious 10, Transformers 7 and Mission: Impossible 7 did not do much better than that (the last, a series low). Indeed, the box office ended up being carried not by the franchise films but by more idiosyncratic successes--The Super Mario Bros. Movie in the spring, and Barbie and Oppenheimer in the summer (and in its own way, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse too), while the absence of hits on that scale meant that the recovery slowed significantly in the fall. (Where for the first eight months of the year the 2023 box office was in real terms 20 percent higher than in the equivalent period in 2022 in the last four it was just 8 percent higher--and would have been worse for lack of such modest but helpful surprises as Five Nights at Freddy's and the record-breaking concert film Taylor Swift: The Era Tour.)
In short, Hollywood remains a very long way from its old grosses, while its method for ever getting there is very much in question now, given that the traditional would-be blockbusters are not bringing in people like they used to do in a manner not seen since the decline of the historical epic and the musical way back in the '60s, and at the same time smaller films are getting to be a tougher sell generally (the audience rejecting not just The Flash but Blue Beetle). Naturally, the road ahead in 2024--a year which offers a franchise blockbuster-heavy slate similar to 2023--does not promise much better, the more in as the pattern of franchise failure is more firmly established (recall that back in February 2023 even an Ant-Man 3 could pull in $200 million domestically, which seems like a real longshot now), and a good many important releases by the strikes of 2023 uncompensated by the bumping of some of 2023's movies into 2024 (so that this year Hollywood will have to do without the grosses of Marvel's Captain America 4 and The Thunderbolts, Mission: Impossible 8, the live-action Snow White adaptation and even Avatar 3). Additionally, admitting that such things are by their nature surprises, anything that has even a whiff of potential Barbie-like success about it (with the consequences of that already demonstrated by the weak grosses of these past four months) seems absent. The result is that I anticipate no great improvement in 2024 over 2023. Indeed, there might even be a fall in the gross from this year's level, as the offerings discussed here fail to tempt audiences back to the theaters to even the extent that they managed to do so last year.
Still, I see no turnaround in studio practice anytime soon, while I expect that the claqueurs of the entertainment press will for the most part grade everything on a curve as they encourage everyone to look on the bright side of things.
* A bit under $7.4 billion in 2022, adjusted for 2023 values the gross (I refer here to the "in calendar" gross as reported by Box Office Mojo, with whose numbers I am working here) was $7.6 billion--against the $14 billion average for 2015-2019 when one makes a similar adjustment for inflation.
** The gross in 2023 was $8.9 billion, about 64 percent of the $14 billion 2015-2019 average.
In short, Hollywood remains a very long way from its old grosses, while its method for ever getting there is very much in question now, given that the traditional would-be blockbusters are not bringing in people like they used to do in a manner not seen since the decline of the historical epic and the musical way back in the '60s, and at the same time smaller films are getting to be a tougher sell generally (the audience rejecting not just The Flash but Blue Beetle). Naturally, the road ahead in 2024--a year which offers a franchise blockbuster-heavy slate similar to 2023--does not promise much better, the more in as the pattern of franchise failure is more firmly established (recall that back in February 2023 even an Ant-Man 3 could pull in $200 million domestically, which seems like a real longshot now), and a good many important releases by the strikes of 2023 uncompensated by the bumping of some of 2023's movies into 2024 (so that this year Hollywood will have to do without the grosses of Marvel's Captain America 4 and The Thunderbolts, Mission: Impossible 8, the live-action Snow White adaptation and even Avatar 3). Additionally, admitting that such things are by their nature surprises, anything that has even a whiff of potential Barbie-like success about it (with the consequences of that already demonstrated by the weak grosses of these past four months) seems absent. The result is that I anticipate no great improvement in 2024 over 2023. Indeed, there might even be a fall in the gross from this year's level, as the offerings discussed here fail to tempt audiences back to the theaters to even the extent that they managed to do so last year.
Still, I see no turnaround in studio practice anytime soon, while I expect that the claqueurs of the entertainment press will for the most part grade everything on a curve as they encourage everyone to look on the bright side of things.
* A bit under $7.4 billion in 2022, adjusted for 2023 values the gross (I refer here to the "in calendar" gross as reported by Box Office Mojo, with whose numbers I am working here) was $7.6 billion--against the $14 billion average for 2015-2019 when one makes a similar adjustment for inflation.
** The gross in 2023 was $8.9 billion, about 64 percent of the $14 billion 2015-2019 average.
Sunday, November 19, 2023
"I Don't Wanna Hear About No Superhero Fatigue!"
There are times when the entertainment media seems to represent movies as bigger successes than they are--grading box office performance on a curve.
This does not seem to have been the case with Captain Marvel 2, the press--which had loudly anticipated a flop before the film's release--calling the film a flop after that first weekend in release (and still more, the second).
However, those "analyses" of the film's performance I have encountered seem to be doing so as part of a particular game--emphasizing that yes, this particular superhero movie is a flop, but one should not draw any wider conclusions from that. Chalk this one up as a misfire suggestive of nothing more than slightly better management over at Marvel could easily fix--not superhero fatigue.
Yet consider the undeniable pattern since the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)'s Phase Three wrapped up back in 2019. Of the MCU movies released since only one really went "above and beyond" at the box office--Spider-Man in December 2021. Of course, one could reasonably chalk up the lackluster performance of its three predecessors (Black Widow, Eternals, Shang-Chi) to the effect of the pandemic and the associated experimentation with streaming (and at the global level, Marvel's shutout from the Chinese market, even if in fairness Marvel should have understood what it was getting into there), but it was also the case that Dr. Strange 2 looked like an underperformer given how well the Spider-Man film it was tied in with had just done, and the fainter than usual competition that season. And everything since has been unambiguously less successful, with the four next MCU sequels (Thor 4, Black Panther 2, Ant-Man 3, Guardians of the Galaxy 3), when the grosses are adjusted for inflation, down 20 to 50 percent from the grosses of the preceding films in their series'. Now Captain Marvel 2 seems almost certain to do worse than that. (Going by my estimates its gross could end up 80 percent down from what the first Captain Marvel made.)
And of course, what has been bad for the MCU has been worse for its principal rival, the DC Extended Universe, which saw Black Adam get a weak reception (failing to crack $400 million global), Shazam 2 make the third-stringer performance of the first Shazam look like boffo b.o. by comparison, and The Flash . . . well, it was pretty shocking back in June, though now we are used to such performances.
This seems to me like a pretty consistent pattern of weak performances by such films--the more in as, in contrast with the 2020-2021 period other movies are becoming really vast successes (as The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Barbie did, for example).
Considering all that my only objection to talk of superhero fatigue is that it understates the problem when we look at a year in which along with the declining grosses of the superhero films Fast and Furious, Transformers, Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible also suffered. Superhero fatigue is really a subset of a wider franchise fatigue and action movie fatigue and blockbuster fatigue, which fatigue for the moment shows no sign of abating--while being a thing Hollywood, and the claqueurs of the entertainment press, can still less afford to admit given how much more deeply threatening it is to the model by which they have made so much money for so long, and for which the increasingly battered studios have absolutely no substitute at hand as they try to keep themselves afloat.
This does not seem to have been the case with Captain Marvel 2, the press--which had loudly anticipated a flop before the film's release--calling the film a flop after that first weekend in release (and still more, the second).
However, those "analyses" of the film's performance I have encountered seem to be doing so as part of a particular game--emphasizing that yes, this particular superhero movie is a flop, but one should not draw any wider conclusions from that. Chalk this one up as a misfire suggestive of nothing more than slightly better management over at Marvel could easily fix--not superhero fatigue.
Yet consider the undeniable pattern since the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)'s Phase Three wrapped up back in 2019. Of the MCU movies released since only one really went "above and beyond" at the box office--Spider-Man in December 2021. Of course, one could reasonably chalk up the lackluster performance of its three predecessors (Black Widow, Eternals, Shang-Chi) to the effect of the pandemic and the associated experimentation with streaming (and at the global level, Marvel's shutout from the Chinese market, even if in fairness Marvel should have understood what it was getting into there), but it was also the case that Dr. Strange 2 looked like an underperformer given how well the Spider-Man film it was tied in with had just done, and the fainter than usual competition that season. And everything since has been unambiguously less successful, with the four next MCU sequels (Thor 4, Black Panther 2, Ant-Man 3, Guardians of the Galaxy 3), when the grosses are adjusted for inflation, down 20 to 50 percent from the grosses of the preceding films in their series'. Now Captain Marvel 2 seems almost certain to do worse than that. (Going by my estimates its gross could end up 80 percent down from what the first Captain Marvel made.)
And of course, what has been bad for the MCU has been worse for its principal rival, the DC Extended Universe, which saw Black Adam get a weak reception (failing to crack $400 million global), Shazam 2 make the third-stringer performance of the first Shazam look like boffo b.o. by comparison, and The Flash . . . well, it was pretty shocking back in June, though now we are used to such performances.
This seems to me like a pretty consistent pattern of weak performances by such films--the more in as, in contrast with the 2020-2021 period other movies are becoming really vast successes (as The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Barbie did, for example).
Considering all that my only objection to talk of superhero fatigue is that it understates the problem when we look at a year in which along with the declining grosses of the superhero films Fast and Furious, Transformers, Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible also suffered. Superhero fatigue is really a subset of a wider franchise fatigue and action movie fatigue and blockbuster fatigue, which fatigue for the moment shows no sign of abating--while being a thing Hollywood, and the claqueurs of the entertainment press, can still less afford to admit given how much more deeply threatening it is to the model by which they have made so much money for so long, and for which the increasingly battered studios have absolutely no substitute at hand as they try to keep themselves afloat.
Sunday, November 5, 2023
Will The Marvels Be the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Solo?
This was probably always a longshot. There was a profound difference between the shared universe of Marvel's superheroes, with their separate though interlinkable adventures, and the cinematic equivalent of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, with regard to the potential to appeal to a really mass audience. And reality caught up with Disney-Lucasfilm that way in 2018, when Solo crashed and burned at the summer box office, putting paid to plans to make Star Wars the equivalent of the MCU. The only Star Wars movie that came out after that was the conclusion of the new main-line trilogy in 2019, after which nothing has appeared--and will not be appearing before 2025 at the earliest as Kathleen Kennedy now speaks not in terms of the spectacularly high output MCU but the low output James Bond films (these days, very, very low output), all as new Star Wars is mainly reserved for the small screen.
Right now it looks as if Captain Marvel 2--aka The Marvels--will be as big a flop as Solo, and perhaps even worse. (Solo made over $200 million domestically--more like $250 million domestically when you adjust for inflation--whereas according to the latest data Captain Marvel 2 may be lucky to make even $150 million.)
Given all this one may wonder if Captain Marvel 2 will not be the MCU's Solo, a flop that forces Disney to back off and profoundly change course. However, sheer inertia will keep the movie from being that, no matter how badly it does at the box office.
After all, when Solo hit theaters Disney's Star Wars movies had been coming out for a mere two-and-a-half years, with Solo only the fourth film in the sequence.
By contrast the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been going strong for over fifteen years now, with Captain Marvel 2 the 33rd movie in the sequence. What Disney merely hoped to achieve with Star Wars, but did not, it did achieve with the MCU, especially in Phase Three--which at this point may be feeling more and more distant for fans, but for the executives probably feels like it was "just yesterday," and not just because time passes differently for old people, or because executive types are slow on the uptake. After all, if things have gone less well since, Spider-Man: No Way Home was as big a success as could have been hoped for even pre-pandemic; if they did not do so well as hoped, the latest Dr. Strange, Thor, Black Panther sequels were among the most profitable movies anyone in Hollywood had in 2022 (#4, #5 and #9 on Deadline's list); Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was at least a respectable performer in the end; and even the disappointment with Ant-Man 3 can be chalked up to exaggerated expectations for what an Ant-Man movie could do and the Chinese market becoming less open to the franchise rather than catastrophic across-the-board collapse.
The result is that where with Solo there was little cushioning against their worst fears that they were acting in a profoundly foolish way in regard to Star Wars. By contrast, even the worst that has been predicted for Captain Marvel 2 runs up against that massive success already behind them so that they can think of it as a fluke and hope for better the next time.
Or several times.
After all, even if the studio really is given pause by Captain Marvel 2's failure, that same matter of inertia leaves them heavily invested right now in a plethora of additional MCU films--with Captain America 4 already in post-production, and three more movies in production (Deadpool 3, The Thunderbolts, Blade), enough to keep the movies coming until at least 2025. Meanwhile there is the lesser investment in two more movies already in "pre-production" (Fantastic Four, Avengers: The Kang Dynasty), to say nothing of others "in development."
Lucasfilm had nothing comparable to that roster of films going when Solo made the studio's management change course, and one cannot picture Disney-Lucasfilm shutting all that down simply because one movie underperformed (however severely). The investment is recognizably the bigger when we consider Marvel's streaming TV empire (Star Wars hadn't got one yet as of the summer of 2018), and the revenue Marvel derives from the way the new films keep up interest in and trickles of revenue coming from the increasingly vast collection of old films (32 before this one!), the merchandising, and the rest on a scale that may also dwarf Star Wars when one puts it all together.
As if all that were not enough the fact that even as Star Wars was not working out Disney was doing so well with its other properties made it easier for the studio chiefs to make the hard decision to back away from its earlier plans for that franchise. After all, they had Pixar, they had their live-action adaptations of their animated classics, they had the MCU, all generating billion-dollar movies in ticket sales on a regular basis. (Indeed, counting the 2019 Spider-Man film the top eight movies at the box office were all Disney productions, each and every one a grosser of $1 billion or more worldwide and the eight together collectively accounting for over $10 billion in ticket sales.)
Now the MCU, even in its weakened state, looks like their strongest asset, with any replacement a long way off, making it far more likely that those calling the shots at Disney will feel that much more pressure to hold on to the MCU for dear life, and hope for the best. The result is that there is probably zero prospect of Captain Marvel 2's failure (should it fail--let us not forget this has not actually happened yet) making Disney change course with the MCU the way that it did with Star Wars. However, it could mean some changes in the longer-term planning, and perhaps more caution in regard to those projects they can still alter.
Is There Any Hope for Captain Marvel 2 at the Box Office?
There has been plenty of pessimism about Captain Marvel 2 in recent weeks--as many an analysis of the available data shows, apparently for excellent reason. Films made from the longtime templates for blockbusters in our era--like big-budget high-concept franchise-based sci-fi action films--have been flopping right and left, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe consistently underperforming since at least Thor 4 four movies back. Moreover, were these precedents not worrying enough in themselves the early box office tracking for the film has produced expectations of, for that type of film, a very poor opening weekend--one in the $45-$62 million range, which is to say, even at the high end of the range, less in real terms than the original Captain Marvel took in on opening day.*
Is there, then, any reason to think the film might do better than disastrously? The best reason I can think of is that hits lately are less front-loaded than they used to be, such that they are displaying the kind of legs that redeem a weak opening, with the prior MCU film worth remarking. Guardians of the Galaxy 3's first Friday-to-Sunday gross was a letdown, but the movie proved "leggier" than expected in slightly better than tripling that opening weekend gross.
If Captain Marvel 2 has an opening weekend closer to the high end of the range and triples that over its run, it would beat Boxoffice Pro's projection--blasting past the $156 million now discussed as the (fairly low) high end of the range it calculated to surpass the $180 million mark. Should the movie quadruple that figure, as many films have done this year, its gross would enter the range of $250 million. And should it quintuple its opening weekend ticket sales the way Elemental did, even starting with the weakest opening projected for it the movie would still blow past the $200 million mark, and at the high end of the range, surpass the $300 million mark, and in the process come to look much, much less like a flop. Indeed, especially were the international gross to correspond to this (so that the global gross is 2.65 times the domestic gross), the movie would end up within striking distance of $800 million, at which point, on the basis of the currently reported outlays for the film, it could end up not just profitable, but one of the more profitable films of the year.
Of course, if the hits are less front-loaded and showing longer legs the flops open weakly--and collapse, as The Flash did (the movie ending up with that weak debut accounting for more than half of all it ever made in North America). This leaves the question of why the movie might--or might not--end up a leggy hit rather than a buckling flop. Where "might" is concerned what the movie seems to have going for it is that if anticipation for it does not seem very strong, the anticipation for the other movies scheduled to come out over the same stretch of the year is less strong than that--Fandango's poll telling us that Captain Marvel 2 is doing about as well that way as any movie in the next two months, with the second most-anticipated movie (and closest competition Captain Marvel has), Aquaman 2, coming out six weeks later. The significance of weak competition should not be underestimated, especially in a time of year in which movies show more box office staying power than tends to be the case in the summer season.
Where the possibility of making this happen is concerned what those hopeful for the film might see as most likely to give the movie its chance is the public's finding Captain Marvel 2 a "pleasant surprise" after the way it has been talked down (which would be the extreme opposite of the way The Flash was talked up so insanely it could not but disappoint). It may also be that the audience will find themselves in the mood for a "silly" Marvel movie at this point, to laugh rather than sit through a played-out repetition of the familiar formulas--and perhaps also find that this one is a better put-together silly movie than Thor 4. (Audience affection for Thor 4 seems to have badly undermined by tonal consistency as it went from the dark horror movie stuff with Gorr the God Butcher to broad comedy and back.) Just avoiding that, and keeping the movie mercifully brief for an audience impatient with lumbering three-hour epics, could work to Captain Marvel 2's advantage.
Still, if a relatively happy outcome for Captain Marvel 2 does not seem wholly outside the range of possibility the movie seems to have an uphill battle ahead of it--on which you can expect to read more right here.
* Captain Marvel took in $61.7 million on the day of release back in March 2019, which adjusted for inflation using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index works out to $75 million.
Is there, then, any reason to think the film might do better than disastrously? The best reason I can think of is that hits lately are less front-loaded than they used to be, such that they are displaying the kind of legs that redeem a weak opening, with the prior MCU film worth remarking. Guardians of the Galaxy 3's first Friday-to-Sunday gross was a letdown, but the movie proved "leggier" than expected in slightly better than tripling that opening weekend gross.
If Captain Marvel 2 has an opening weekend closer to the high end of the range and triples that over its run, it would beat Boxoffice Pro's projection--blasting past the $156 million now discussed as the (fairly low) high end of the range it calculated to surpass the $180 million mark. Should the movie quadruple that figure, as many films have done this year, its gross would enter the range of $250 million. And should it quintuple its opening weekend ticket sales the way Elemental did, even starting with the weakest opening projected for it the movie would still blow past the $200 million mark, and at the high end of the range, surpass the $300 million mark, and in the process come to look much, much less like a flop. Indeed, especially were the international gross to correspond to this (so that the global gross is 2.65 times the domestic gross), the movie would end up within striking distance of $800 million, at which point, on the basis of the currently reported outlays for the film, it could end up not just profitable, but one of the more profitable films of the year.
Of course, if the hits are less front-loaded and showing longer legs the flops open weakly--and collapse, as The Flash did (the movie ending up with that weak debut accounting for more than half of all it ever made in North America). This leaves the question of why the movie might--or might not--end up a leggy hit rather than a buckling flop. Where "might" is concerned what the movie seems to have going for it is that if anticipation for it does not seem very strong, the anticipation for the other movies scheduled to come out over the same stretch of the year is less strong than that--Fandango's poll telling us that Captain Marvel 2 is doing about as well that way as any movie in the next two months, with the second most-anticipated movie (and closest competition Captain Marvel has), Aquaman 2, coming out six weeks later. The significance of weak competition should not be underestimated, especially in a time of year in which movies show more box office staying power than tends to be the case in the summer season.
Where the possibility of making this happen is concerned what those hopeful for the film might see as most likely to give the movie its chance is the public's finding Captain Marvel 2 a "pleasant surprise" after the way it has been talked down (which would be the extreme opposite of the way The Flash was talked up so insanely it could not but disappoint). It may also be that the audience will find themselves in the mood for a "silly" Marvel movie at this point, to laugh rather than sit through a played-out repetition of the familiar formulas--and perhaps also find that this one is a better put-together silly movie than Thor 4. (Audience affection for Thor 4 seems to have badly undermined by tonal consistency as it went from the dark horror movie stuff with Gorr the God Butcher to broad comedy and back.) Just avoiding that, and keeping the movie mercifully brief for an audience impatient with lumbering three-hour epics, could work to Captain Marvel 2's advantage.
Still, if a relatively happy outcome for Captain Marvel 2 does not seem wholly outside the range of possibility the movie seems to have an uphill battle ahead of it--on which you can expect to read more right here.
* Captain Marvel took in $61.7 million on the day of release back in March 2019, which adjusted for inflation using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index works out to $75 million.
Wednesday, October 25, 2023
Just How Long Have the Running Times of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Films Actually Been?
The reports of Captain Marvel 2 as the shortest film the Marvel Cinematic Universe had to date sent me checking the figures on that. Just checking the numbers at Box Office Mojo it appeared that the 32 prior Marvel Cinematic Universe films ranged in running time from 112 minutes (for 2008's The Incredible Hulk and 2013's Thor 2) to 181 minutes (for 2019's Avengers: Endgame). The average seems to have been 133 minutes for the whole sequence from the original 2008 Iron Man to Guardians of the Galaxy 3, though it should be noted that the movies have trended toward longer running times--with the Phase One average 124 minutes, the Phase Two average 126 minutes, the Phase Three average 136 minutes and the Phase Four average 139 minutes, working out to a 15 minute growth from Phase One to Phase Four.
Still, even allowing for the overall trend toward longer movies there are distinct patterns to the differences in length across phases. Those movies about a larger grouping, as with the four Avengers films (ranging from 141 to 181 minutes), Captain America: Civil War (143 minutes) or The Eternals (156 minutes), tend to be rather longer than those centered on a single character, and especially those introducing a new character, which tend to clock in at the low end of the range (115-125 minutes or so). The Phase Four-released Captain Marvel was no exception to the pattern, coming as it did to just 123 minutes.
One also sees a tendency to brevity in the lighter, more comedy-oriented films. Certainly the Ant-Man films tended to run shorter than the average (averaging about two hours versus the 133 minute norm for the saga), with this also going for the notoriously silly Thor 4 (which clocked in at just 118 minutes).
As The Marvels has a tighter focus and lighter tone it seems natural for it to tend toward a shorter running time, to run for a little under two hours rather than a lumbering two-and-a-half. However, it is still something of a surprise to see a Phase Five sequel clock in at 18 minutes shorter than the original Captain Marvel, and about a quarter shorter than the usual Phase Four running time.
Still, even allowing for the overall trend toward longer movies there are distinct patterns to the differences in length across phases. Those movies about a larger grouping, as with the four Avengers films (ranging from 141 to 181 minutes), Captain America: Civil War (143 minutes) or The Eternals (156 minutes), tend to be rather longer than those centered on a single character, and especially those introducing a new character, which tend to clock in at the low end of the range (115-125 minutes or so). The Phase Four-released Captain Marvel was no exception to the pattern, coming as it did to just 123 minutes.
One also sees a tendency to brevity in the lighter, more comedy-oriented films. Certainly the Ant-Man films tended to run shorter than the average (averaging about two hours versus the 133 minute norm for the saga), with this also going for the notoriously silly Thor 4 (which clocked in at just 118 minutes).
As The Marvels has a tighter focus and lighter tone it seems natural for it to tend toward a shorter running time, to run for a little under two hours rather than a lumbering two-and-a-half. However, it is still something of a surprise to see a Phase Five sequel clock in at 18 minutes shorter than the original Captain Marvel, and about a quarter shorter than the usual Phase Four running time.
Thursday, October 19, 2023
Can the Marvel Cinematic Universe Make a Comeback?
However, as with so much else in the world the period since the pandemic has been unkind to it--the movie industry generally taking a brutal beating, one whose effects have persisted even as audiences for the most part resumed their theatergoing, with the MCU suffering along with the rest. Much of the MCU's trouble has been a matter of a more closed Chinese market (this was the biggest factor in the trouble Ant-Man 3 had), but it has had its share of woes even in its home North American market, where Thor 4, Black Panther 2, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 all performed below what might have been hoped for given their predecessors' earnings--while the current expectations regarding Captain Marvel 2 look a lot like what happened with The Flash, implying that worse, much worse, may be in store not just for that movie but the several others behind it in the pipeline, and the Marvel brand as a whole.
Moreover, even relative recovery can seem a longshot given, regardless of what Marvel does with its movies, the kind of movie Marvel makes and can be expected to go on making in any conceivable scenario--the high-concept action-adventure blockbuster franchise movie, which, as the troubles of the James Bond series that invented the form, and the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series' that went such a long way to making them a Hollywood staple, and the DCEU that has been Marvel's closest thing to a rival, and this summer's Fast and Furious and Transformers and Mission: Impossible movies all show, is looking very shopworn these days in the 2020s. Indeed, investing in superhero movies these days is starting to look like investing in big, splashy historical epics and musicals in the late 1960s--sticking to an ever-more costly and increasingly losing old game when the studios would be doing better to look to new ideas to be the basis of new successes.
* Of course, these have been inflationary years, and $9 billion in 2018-2019 works out to more like $11 billion today.
Saturday, October 14, 2023
Captain Marvel 2 vs. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Captain Marvel 2's Likely Box Office
In the wake of Boxoffice Pro's announcement of its tracking data-based projections for the domestic opening weekend and overall run of Captain Marvel 2 the figures have been making the rounds of the "armchair movie executive"-oriented entertainment news outlets. Given that the figures suggest the movie's performing much less like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) Phase Three-released original Captain Marvel than they do The Flash (with an opening weekend in the $50-$75 million range and an overall run in the $120-$190 million range, vs. the half-billion dollar hit that first film was in today's terms), there has not been much room for even the most grade-on-a-curve-minded of the claqueurs of the entertainment press to pretend this is anything like good news for the movie. (Indeed, "abysmal" reads the headline at one such site.)
Since I had weeks ago suggested that the movie might be the MCU's equivalent of the DCEU's The Flash this was not exactly a shock to me--but I admit that there was some room for people to think otherwise, and not simply because they were cleaving to old predictions like Screen Rant's guess back in January.* One reason is Guardians of the Galaxy 3's performance this past summer, which it seems worthwhile to revisit.
In raising the matter of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 one should start by acknowledging that the movie did not buck the trend of MCU films making less (in inflation-adjusted, real terms) than their immediate series predecessors--the movie making a good deal less than Guardians of the Galaxy 2, as against the quarter-to-half drop seen with the other movies. However, in comparison with the latest Thor, Black Panther, Ant-Man films, it held up rather better--the drop about 20 percent relative to Guardians of the Galaxy 2. This could have been taken as meaning Captain Marvel 2 might not do too badly relative to its own high-performing predecessor. However, there were at least four significant differences undermining any such analogy (which was why, even months ago, I did not see Captain Marvel 2 breaking $700 million, let alone a billion):
1. Considering the case of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 it is worth remembering that the film was initially seen as a disappointment--its opening weekend gross softer than anticipated (a rough one-third drop from what its predecessor managed domestically). However, the film turned out to have surprisingly good "legs"--better than its predecessor (so that where the second Guardians movie made 2.65 times its opening weekend gross, Guardians 3 more than tripled the take from its first three days), implying a particularly strong audience response. That suggested that a film audiences liked might do a bit better than some of those that had gone before it, but it could not be taken for granted that this would happen with other Marvel movies (while, again, the film still ended up with 20 percent less grossed than its predecessor).
2. Just as Guardians of the Galaxy 3 proved an exception in its good legs, making it a questionable point of comparison for Captain Marvel 2, the first Captain Marvel was also an outlier--as it was released in the most fortuitous possible circumstances for such a movie. Not only did it come out during the MCU's Phase Three, but it came out mere weeks before the absolute peak of the franchise with the release of Avengers: Endgame, maximizing interest; while the claims made for the film as a "social justice first," if redounding less to the film's benefit than did the similar claims for Black Panther a year earlier, probably helping as well. The result was an exceptional boost to the film which must be credited with helping it become a $1 billion+ hit. Their absence (because Phase Five is a long way from Phase Three, because a sequel is by definition not a "first"), which makes the film less of an event, means that the drop can be expected to be that much sharper here--hence my use of Black Panther rather than the other Marvel films as a basis for my own projection (though going by the current numbers even that may have been overoptimistic).
3. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 had the benefit of considerable good will toward Guardians of the Galaxy 2, whereas Captain Marvel left audiences divided. A Rotten Tomatoes score may have its limitations as an indicator of audience feeling, especially as the claims of a campaign against the film led to the changes in its tabulation of general audience input, but all the same, where Guardians of the Galaxy 2 had an audience score of 87 percent, Captain Marvel had, and has, a mere 45 percent.
4. Captain Marvel 2's promotion has suffered from significant weaknesses. There has already been a delay of the release date (the movie bumped from July to November), connected with claims about reshoots and questionable VFX work (which was a problem for Ant-Man 3), none of which is ever encouraging. The film's budget has recently been treated as something of a scandal (unfairly, I think, but it happened all the same). An early trailer, perhaps reflecting the belated VFX work, made the movie look cheap by MCU standards, and if a later trailer made a more favorable impression that way some damage was probably done. There is also the promise that this will be a relatively goofy MCU movie--an approach that smacks of "tired franchise," and probably did not help Thor 4. The fact of a tie-in with Ms. Marvel may not be helpful (given that the general audience that makes big grosses possible does not want things to get so intricate and sprawling as to require complex investment), while the attempt to broaden the audience by airing the show on the Disney-owned ABC broadcast network so much more widely accessible than Disney Plus has not been a great success. And amid the continuation of the actors' strike the actors have been less visible "on the media circuit," and may remain so, to the film's disadvantage. I cannot see any comparison between this collection of troubles, and the promotional effort for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (which still produced that film's weak opening weekend).
In the face of all that one might still have hoped that Guardians of the Galaxy 3's relatively good reception was indicative of, and conducive to, warmer feeling toward the Marvel brand, and that Captain Marvel 2 would derive some benefit from that--but if it has done that it has not happened in anywhere near the degree that it would need to do to make the movie anything but a flop-in-the-making, at least going by what we see at the moment.
* Screen Rant projected that Captain Marvel 2 would make $950 million in January--while also guessing Ant-Man 3 would be a $1 billion hit, and Guardians of the Galaxy 3 take in $1.2 billion. Alas, all that seems very far away now.
Since I had weeks ago suggested that the movie might be the MCU's equivalent of the DCEU's The Flash this was not exactly a shock to me--but I admit that there was some room for people to think otherwise, and not simply because they were cleaving to old predictions like Screen Rant's guess back in January.* One reason is Guardians of the Galaxy 3's performance this past summer, which it seems worthwhile to revisit.
In raising the matter of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 one should start by acknowledging that the movie did not buck the trend of MCU films making less (in inflation-adjusted, real terms) than their immediate series predecessors--the movie making a good deal less than Guardians of the Galaxy 2, as against the quarter-to-half drop seen with the other movies. However, in comparison with the latest Thor, Black Panther, Ant-Man films, it held up rather better--the drop about 20 percent relative to Guardians of the Galaxy 2. This could have been taken as meaning Captain Marvel 2 might not do too badly relative to its own high-performing predecessor. However, there were at least four significant differences undermining any such analogy (which was why, even months ago, I did not see Captain Marvel 2 breaking $700 million, let alone a billion):
1. Considering the case of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 it is worth remembering that the film was initially seen as a disappointment--its opening weekend gross softer than anticipated (a rough one-third drop from what its predecessor managed domestically). However, the film turned out to have surprisingly good "legs"--better than its predecessor (so that where the second Guardians movie made 2.65 times its opening weekend gross, Guardians 3 more than tripled the take from its first three days), implying a particularly strong audience response. That suggested that a film audiences liked might do a bit better than some of those that had gone before it, but it could not be taken for granted that this would happen with other Marvel movies (while, again, the film still ended up with 20 percent less grossed than its predecessor).
2. Just as Guardians of the Galaxy 3 proved an exception in its good legs, making it a questionable point of comparison for Captain Marvel 2, the first Captain Marvel was also an outlier--as it was released in the most fortuitous possible circumstances for such a movie. Not only did it come out during the MCU's Phase Three, but it came out mere weeks before the absolute peak of the franchise with the release of Avengers: Endgame, maximizing interest; while the claims made for the film as a "social justice first," if redounding less to the film's benefit than did the similar claims for Black Panther a year earlier, probably helping as well. The result was an exceptional boost to the film which must be credited with helping it become a $1 billion+ hit. Their absence (because Phase Five is a long way from Phase Three, because a sequel is by definition not a "first"), which makes the film less of an event, means that the drop can be expected to be that much sharper here--hence my use of Black Panther rather than the other Marvel films as a basis for my own projection (though going by the current numbers even that may have been overoptimistic).
3. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 had the benefit of considerable good will toward Guardians of the Galaxy 2, whereas Captain Marvel left audiences divided. A Rotten Tomatoes score may have its limitations as an indicator of audience feeling, especially as the claims of a campaign against the film led to the changes in its tabulation of general audience input, but all the same, where Guardians of the Galaxy 2 had an audience score of 87 percent, Captain Marvel had, and has, a mere 45 percent.
4. Captain Marvel 2's promotion has suffered from significant weaknesses. There has already been a delay of the release date (the movie bumped from July to November), connected with claims about reshoots and questionable VFX work (which was a problem for Ant-Man 3), none of which is ever encouraging. The film's budget has recently been treated as something of a scandal (unfairly, I think, but it happened all the same). An early trailer, perhaps reflecting the belated VFX work, made the movie look cheap by MCU standards, and if a later trailer made a more favorable impression that way some damage was probably done. There is also the promise that this will be a relatively goofy MCU movie--an approach that smacks of "tired franchise," and probably did not help Thor 4. The fact of a tie-in with Ms. Marvel may not be helpful (given that the general audience that makes big grosses possible does not want things to get so intricate and sprawling as to require complex investment), while the attempt to broaden the audience by airing the show on the Disney-owned ABC broadcast network so much more widely accessible than Disney Plus has not been a great success. And amid the continuation of the actors' strike the actors have been less visible "on the media circuit," and may remain so, to the film's disadvantage. I cannot see any comparison between this collection of troubles, and the promotional effort for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (which still produced that film's weak opening weekend).
In the face of all that one might still have hoped that Guardians of the Galaxy 3's relatively good reception was indicative of, and conducive to, warmer feeling toward the Marvel brand, and that Captain Marvel 2 would derive some benefit from that--but if it has done that it has not happened in anywhere near the degree that it would need to do to make the movie anything but a flop-in-the-making, at least going by what we see at the moment.
* Screen Rant projected that Captain Marvel 2 would make $950 million in January--while also guessing Ant-Man 3 would be a $1 billion hit, and Guardians of the Galaxy 3 take in $1.2 billion. Alas, all that seems very far away now.
Saturday, September 23, 2023
Could Captain Marvel 2 be the Marvel Cinematic Universe's The Flash?
The result is that I find myself wondering--could Captain Marvel 2 (aka The Marvels) be to the Marvel Cinematic Universe what Solo was to Star Wars, what Indiana Jones 5 was to that series, what The Flash has been to the DCEU? Compared with when I made my prediction about The Marvels four months ago, at the beginning rather than the end of the franchise flop-packed summer of 2023, I see even less reason than before for optimism about the performance of superhero sequels like this one, whether from the DCEU, Marvel or anywhere else. Yet the fact remains that my estimate for The Marvels was already fairly low to begin with--premised on what the Black Panther franchise suffered in its theatrical revenues from the first to the second film, a drop of perhaps half in the "real" worldwide box office gross not inconceivable, leaving it with $600-$700 million collected.
Since that time I have seen no reason to think the film will do much better--while certain of the disadvantages it is likely to have are clearer. The film's shift in tone to something goofier than what its predecessors offered may not go over well with audiences (it is the kind of thing that tends to bespeak a run-down series, and very likely did not help Thor 4), while the crossover element can be awkward for people who did not see (or saw but did not like) the associated series--and this all counting the more at a time when viewers are less enthusiastic than before about moviegoing, more fickle in regard to movies that just a short time ago were nearly sure-fire "events." The result is that I do think a Solo/Indiana Jones 5/The Flash-style collapse (the movie's doing less than the $600-$700 million I anticipated, the movie maybe doing just half that business) is not wildly implausible--though of course we will know more in a few weeks, when the box office tracking starts to come in.
For an updated view of the issue, see the author's latest on Captain Marvel 2's prospects.
Saturday, July 22, 2023
Captain Marvel 2's Prospects: Revisiting the Box Office Prediction
The new trailer for The Marvels is out.
My thoughts: in contrast with the prior trailer, which frankly made the movie look a bit cheap, and may have overemphasized the element of goofy comedy, the new one makes The Marvels at least look the part of a big-budget CGI-packed Marvel Cinematic Universe adventure.
Of course, I had thought this would probably happen soon enough (especially given the talk of the film's release's delay having had to do at least in part with the desire to get the FX right), so this does not change things much from what I expected back in early May.
Rather what has changed is my image of the American box office's condition (and the world's as well). Late last year my thought was that 2023 would see the box office more or less return to its pre-pandemic norm, and this was confirmed by the first four months of the year as the box office take improved significantly over the same period back in 2022. However, instead of this summer continuing that improvement the summer of 2023's first two months actually saw a drop compared with that of 2022, so that the box office has been moving further away from the pre-pandemic norm rather than closing the gap with it.
Putting it simply, this summer has indeed been crowded with tentpoles--but audiences have rejected them, with this year's installments in the biggest franchises underperforming again and again (Fast and Furious, Transformers, even Indiana Jones), with superhero films not exempt (The Flash). Meanwhile salvation has not been forthcoming from the international markets (with China, in particular, ever less receptive to Hollywood's products).
Of course, there is a counter-argument in Captain Marvel 2's case. Admittedly Marvel has not escaped the more general trend toward lower grosses by any means, with Thor 4, Black Panther 2 and especially Ant-Man 3 doing much less well than their predecessors. Still, if Phase Four was disappointing (even more so than was publicly known, it seemed, given the recent revelations about how Dr. Strange 2 really did), only Ant-Man 3 looks like a genuine flop, with this substantially a matter of its performance in China, while Guardians of the Galaxy 3, if not wholly bucking the trend, is still a hit by just about any standard by Marvel's (and indeed, the second-biggest hit of the year as of July, after only The Super Mario Bros. Movie).* This suggests that Marvel, if looking ever further away from its Phase Three peak, is at least a more robust contender than the competition (which has done a lot worse), and should not be counted out too hastily. Indeed, should Captain Marvel 2 suffer only a Guardians of the Galaxy 3-like drop in its theatrical gross when compared with its predecessor it would still be a $1 billion hit--perhaps the only such non-animated film to achieve that distinction this year.**
Still, it is worth noting that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was saved by decent legs after a disappointing opening that raised the specter of its being another Ant-Man 3. This suggests that people's enthusiasm had been dimmed, while the film's good legs were probably at least in part a matter of surprisingly slight competition as all those other big summer movies failed to interest viewers, and they still left Guardians of the Galaxy 3 the weakest performer by a good way in a trilogy that was a long way from being Marvel's strongest performer. The result is that lot would have to go Captain Marvel 2's way for the film to be as fortunate in its commercial release--the more in as the film confronts so many headwinds. The result is that I am sticking with my expectation of $700 million as high as it is likely to go--while, as with Shazam 2, The Flash and Indiana Jones (and the upcoming Aquaman 2) I find myself increasingly wondering about the possibility of collapse.
* Adjusting mid-2017 (i.e. May 2017) prices for those of mid-2023 (May 2023) the gross of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 comes to about $1.07 billion, versus the $850 million at which Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is topping out, leaving it a fifth down in real terms.
** Adjusting March 2019 prices for mid-2023 turns Captain Marvel's $1.1 billion gross into one of $1.35 billion today--20 percent off of which would still leave the movie with $1.08 billion.
My thoughts: in contrast with the prior trailer, which frankly made the movie look a bit cheap, and may have overemphasized the element of goofy comedy, the new one makes The Marvels at least look the part of a big-budget CGI-packed Marvel Cinematic Universe adventure.
Of course, I had thought this would probably happen soon enough (especially given the talk of the film's release's delay having had to do at least in part with the desire to get the FX right), so this does not change things much from what I expected back in early May.
Rather what has changed is my image of the American box office's condition (and the world's as well). Late last year my thought was that 2023 would see the box office more or less return to its pre-pandemic norm, and this was confirmed by the first four months of the year as the box office take improved significantly over the same period back in 2022. However, instead of this summer continuing that improvement the summer of 2023's first two months actually saw a drop compared with that of 2022, so that the box office has been moving further away from the pre-pandemic norm rather than closing the gap with it.
Putting it simply, this summer has indeed been crowded with tentpoles--but audiences have rejected them, with this year's installments in the biggest franchises underperforming again and again (Fast and Furious, Transformers, even Indiana Jones), with superhero films not exempt (The Flash). Meanwhile salvation has not been forthcoming from the international markets (with China, in particular, ever less receptive to Hollywood's products).
Of course, there is a counter-argument in Captain Marvel 2's case. Admittedly Marvel has not escaped the more general trend toward lower grosses by any means, with Thor 4, Black Panther 2 and especially Ant-Man 3 doing much less well than their predecessors. Still, if Phase Four was disappointing (even more so than was publicly known, it seemed, given the recent revelations about how Dr. Strange 2 really did), only Ant-Man 3 looks like a genuine flop, with this substantially a matter of its performance in China, while Guardians of the Galaxy 3, if not wholly bucking the trend, is still a hit by just about any standard by Marvel's (and indeed, the second-biggest hit of the year as of July, after only The Super Mario Bros. Movie).* This suggests that Marvel, if looking ever further away from its Phase Three peak, is at least a more robust contender than the competition (which has done a lot worse), and should not be counted out too hastily. Indeed, should Captain Marvel 2 suffer only a Guardians of the Galaxy 3-like drop in its theatrical gross when compared with its predecessor it would still be a $1 billion hit--perhaps the only such non-animated film to achieve that distinction this year.**
Still, it is worth noting that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was saved by decent legs after a disappointing opening that raised the specter of its being another Ant-Man 3. This suggests that people's enthusiasm had been dimmed, while the film's good legs were probably at least in part a matter of surprisingly slight competition as all those other big summer movies failed to interest viewers, and they still left Guardians of the Galaxy 3 the weakest performer by a good way in a trilogy that was a long way from being Marvel's strongest performer. The result is that lot would have to go Captain Marvel 2's way for the film to be as fortunate in its commercial release--the more in as the film confronts so many headwinds. The result is that I am sticking with my expectation of $700 million as high as it is likely to go--while, as with Shazam 2, The Flash and Indiana Jones (and the upcoming Aquaman 2) I find myself increasingly wondering about the possibility of collapse.
* Adjusting mid-2017 (i.e. May 2017) prices for those of mid-2023 (May 2023) the gross of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 comes to about $1.07 billion, versus the $850 million at which Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is topping out, leaving it a fifth down in real terms.
** Adjusting March 2019 prices for mid-2023 turns Captain Marvel's $1.1 billion gross into one of $1.35 billion today--20 percent off of which would still leave the movie with $1.08 billion.
Saturday, June 24, 2023
The Marvels' Trailer: A Reaction
The trailer for The Marvels has me anticipating a movie that places the accent on goofy comedy.
Think Thor 4.
Except, to go by the visuals, a lot cheaper looking.
Granted, we have heard a lot about Marvel taking the time to get the CGI right on this one after the criticism of Ant-Man 3, but all the same one might have hoped for somewhat more dazzle--at least, in comparison with the contemporaneous trailer for the originally straight-to-streaming Blue Beetle.
My gut reaction: what it shows of the movie makes me more, not less, confident of my expectation of a significant drop in gross from the 2019 Captain Marvel (while, as it happens, my expectations for Blue Beetle moved up at least a couple of notches on the basis of its flashy, action-packed trailer).
Think Thor 4.
Except, to go by the visuals, a lot cheaper looking.
Granted, we have heard a lot about Marvel taking the time to get the CGI right on this one after the criticism of Ant-Man 3, but all the same one might have hoped for somewhat more dazzle--at least, in comparison with the contemporaneous trailer for the originally straight-to-streaming Blue Beetle.
My gut reaction: what it shows of the movie makes me more, not less, confident of my expectation of a significant drop in gross from the 2019 Captain Marvel (while, as it happens, my expectations for Blue Beetle moved up at least a couple of notches on the basis of its flashy, action-packed trailer).
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
How Much Does a $250 Million Production Need to Make in Order to Break Even?
We seem to hear the figure $250 million in relation to production budgets a lot these days. Thor 4 and Black Panther 2 supposedly cost that much. So did Guardians of the Galaxy 3. And lots of others.
Seeing how much money these films cost, and how much they made at the box office (well under $1 billion in the case of the first two, with the same expected in the case of the third), people wondered "Was that enough for them to break even?"
The completely unsatisfying but true answer is "It depends."
Not every reported production budget figure is accurate. Even when they are people do not always mean the same thing when they speak of "production budgets." They may be speaking of what it cost to make the movie--or the "net" cost, which is to say how much the studio had to spend, rather than what was covered by outside sources like product placement or tax breaks. They may, consciously or unconsciously, include the "interest and overhead," but not always.
Meanwhile there are the uncertainties about what was spent after production on promotion and distribution--starting with "prints and ads." There is also the matter of "participations and residuals" (as in, someone else gets their cut of the gross, right off the top, pushing the moment at which the backer of a movie breaks even on what they laid out further off). All of this is never cheap, but it can vary very wildly--while the details get a lot less publicity than production costs with the participations and residuals especially complicating things greatly. (Certainly participations and residuals on Top Gun 2 cost almost twice the production budget of the film, $315 million to $177 million.)
Finally, there is how we think about revenue. We usually think in terms of box office gross, of which the studio that made the film is apt to get 40-50 percent of the total in "rentals." But home entertainment, TV, streaming are hugely important revenue generators, even for big hits often delivering 40 percent or more of the total income.
The result of the latter especially is that a movie that would not come close to breaking even on its theatrical run ends up not only breaking even in the end, but a money-maker, with a good example Thor 4. That movie, which according to Deadline really did run $250 million in production costs, without the interest and overhead (another $45 million), and far from slight expenditures on prints and ads ($160 million!), thus incurred well over $400 million in costs just getting into theaters, before any thought of participations and residuals came into the picture.
The movie ended up grossing $760 million theatrically--and netting just $350 million in theatrical rentals. And it would have been a big loss-maker if the issue ended there.
However, between home entertainment, television, streaming, the movie netted another $300 million. In the process the film got $650 million in revenues, for an eventual outlay (participations and residuals included) of a little under $550 million.
So in short--a $250 million movie that grossed just $760 million at the box office not only broke even, but made $100 million+, landing it a spot on the list of the most profitable films of the year. Moreover, all this is without getting into such matters as the value provided in its propping up of a bigger franchise (as is the case with the Marvel Cinematic Universe), or the colossal revenues derived by that franchise from marketing (which propping up that franchise helps, even beyond direct sales of Thor-related merchandise).
All this goes to show that a movie that can fairly be considered a disappointment and an underperformer (compared with, for instance, Thor 3 and the standard the MCU seemed to set in its storied Phase Three) was, taken in itself, very much worth the while for the investors. And so is it likely to go with other similarly expensive movies that at least avoid making much less than the Thor sequel.
Seeing how much money these films cost, and how much they made at the box office (well under $1 billion in the case of the first two, with the same expected in the case of the third), people wondered "Was that enough for them to break even?"
The completely unsatisfying but true answer is "It depends."
Not every reported production budget figure is accurate. Even when they are people do not always mean the same thing when they speak of "production budgets." They may be speaking of what it cost to make the movie--or the "net" cost, which is to say how much the studio had to spend, rather than what was covered by outside sources like product placement or tax breaks. They may, consciously or unconsciously, include the "interest and overhead," but not always.
Meanwhile there are the uncertainties about what was spent after production on promotion and distribution--starting with "prints and ads." There is also the matter of "participations and residuals" (as in, someone else gets their cut of the gross, right off the top, pushing the moment at which the backer of a movie breaks even on what they laid out further off). All of this is never cheap, but it can vary very wildly--while the details get a lot less publicity than production costs with the participations and residuals especially complicating things greatly. (Certainly participations and residuals on Top Gun 2 cost almost twice the production budget of the film, $315 million to $177 million.)
Finally, there is how we think about revenue. We usually think in terms of box office gross, of which the studio that made the film is apt to get 40-50 percent of the total in "rentals." But home entertainment, TV, streaming are hugely important revenue generators, even for big hits often delivering 40 percent or more of the total income.
The result of the latter especially is that a movie that would not come close to breaking even on its theatrical run ends up not only breaking even in the end, but a money-maker, with a good example Thor 4. That movie, which according to Deadline really did run $250 million in production costs, without the interest and overhead (another $45 million), and far from slight expenditures on prints and ads ($160 million!), thus incurred well over $400 million in costs just getting into theaters, before any thought of participations and residuals came into the picture.
The movie ended up grossing $760 million theatrically--and netting just $350 million in theatrical rentals. And it would have been a big loss-maker if the issue ended there.
However, between home entertainment, television, streaming, the movie netted another $300 million. In the process the film got $650 million in revenues, for an eventual outlay (participations and residuals included) of a little under $550 million.
So in short--a $250 million movie that grossed just $760 million at the box office not only broke even, but made $100 million+, landing it a spot on the list of the most profitable films of the year. Moreover, all this is without getting into such matters as the value provided in its propping up of a bigger franchise (as is the case with the Marvel Cinematic Universe), or the colossal revenues derived by that franchise from marketing (which propping up that franchise helps, even beyond direct sales of Thor-related merchandise).
All this goes to show that a movie that can fairly be considered a disappointment and an underperformer (compared with, for instance, Thor 3 and the standard the MCU seemed to set in its storied Phase Three) was, taken in itself, very much worth the while for the investors. And so is it likely to go with other similarly expensive movies that at least avoid making much less than the Thor sequel.
Thursday, May 25, 2023
The James Bond Franchise's Trajectory and the Marvel Cinematic Universe
With Phase Three's routinization of billion-dollar grosses (and $5 billion off just the two-part Avengers battle with Thanos!) the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) recently represented the epitome of what a popular franchise could achieve at the box office. (Snobs snickered about "Marvel envy" as they watched Warner Bros., Universal and others try to have similar success, but there were excellent reasons for the envy, from a business standpoint at least.)
Of course, no reasonable person could expect Phase Three-caliber success to go on forever, any more than any other comparable pop cultural sensation (or business success) can go on forever. The pandemic probably did quicken the end of the good times (my own prediction in 2019 was that Black Widow was 2020's surest bet for a billion dollar gross, and I think it probably would have grossed a billion in today's dollars if it had not been for the pandemic), but all the same Phase Four was pretty anti-climactic after that the big Avengers two-parter, while Phase Five has yet to show much sign of restoring "Marvel supremacy." Indeed, I wonder if there is not already a rush to end it and get on with Phase Six--though even allowing for the prospect of recovery getting the MCU's box office draw back to its Phase Three level is a tall order, with nothing quite like the boom years of 2016-2019 to be seen again (because, commercially at least, they really were that spectacular), and that those years will continue to be recognizable as Marvel's commercial peak.
Of course, that fact does not spell the end of the MCU by any means, with the James Bond series--because this was not only the first of the high-concept action-adventure blockbusters as we now know them, but because having run so long it has probably already gone where the other franchises eventually will (as consideration of the handling of Star Wars, for example, demonstrates)--a useful point of reference here. As it happened the Bond series peaked in the mid-1960s, with Thunderball and You Only Live Twice, after which there was more caution in laying out the money, because grosses were not what they had been (Twice, the highest-cost film made to date, and the first to bring in less than its predecessor, such that points of comparison afterward would be few). But the franchise went on cranking out new Bond films. For a half century, and counting.
It is a reminder that a series can go on for a very long time indeed after ticket sales slip. Still, the Bond series did so in a different time, when the economics of filmmaking were different, and the market was different. Through the late '60s, and well into the '70s, there was nothing quite like them from the standpoint of action-adventure spectacle, which probably helped a great deal in their lingering on. Moreover, if when such competition arrived the series suffered for it (the '80s, certainly, a low point for the series commercially, especially but not just in the U.S.), there was even in the '90s more room for the franchise to rally than it enjoys today. Moreover, after a mere four films, and a quashed attempt at a spin-off (in the unmade Jinx Johnson adventures), the producers thought a reboot in order--which was to see a mere five films cranked out between 2002 and the present, with the disappointing response to the last of those films giving the producers pause about a next attempt likely to be many more years off.
It is all a far cry from the MCU's cranking out three $200 million+ headline movies year in, year out in the expectation of takers, with a vast patchwork of tie-ins also going (as in the streaming TV series). Still, for the time being the movies, if not pulling in what they used to do, are among the more profitable films around, with Doctor Strange 2 #4, Black Panther #2 and Thor 4 #9 on Deadline's list of money-makers last year (even the last delivering a cash-on-cash return of over $100 million), which would seem quite enough to have the other studios still suffering from "Marvel envy." The issue, though, is how long the MCU's films can go on doing that well, with the trend of the returns on an immense investment so evidently downward--and I would add, more at issue than the fate of this one franchise. I cannot say for certain just how much "superhero fatigue" is out there (I actually expected it to have finished the wave of superhero films long before this point), but it seems to me that the broader pattern of blockbuster filmmaking may well be in trouble--like the old-style Hollywood musical in the late '60s. If that proves to be the case then the MCU's problems will be of a nature far, far more fundamental than the mismanagement or overexploitation of a single franchise.
Of course, no reasonable person could expect Phase Three-caliber success to go on forever, any more than any other comparable pop cultural sensation (or business success) can go on forever. The pandemic probably did quicken the end of the good times (my own prediction in 2019 was that Black Widow was 2020's surest bet for a billion dollar gross, and I think it probably would have grossed a billion in today's dollars if it had not been for the pandemic), but all the same Phase Four was pretty anti-climactic after that the big Avengers two-parter, while Phase Five has yet to show much sign of restoring "Marvel supremacy." Indeed, I wonder if there is not already a rush to end it and get on with Phase Six--though even allowing for the prospect of recovery getting the MCU's box office draw back to its Phase Three level is a tall order, with nothing quite like the boom years of 2016-2019 to be seen again (because, commercially at least, they really were that spectacular), and that those years will continue to be recognizable as Marvel's commercial peak.
It is all a far cry from the MCU's cranking out three $200 million+ headline movies year in, year out in the expectation of takers, with a vast patchwork of tie-ins also going (as in the streaming TV series). Still, for the time being the movies, if not pulling in what they used to do, are among the more profitable films around, with Doctor Strange 2 #4, Black Panther #2 and Thor 4 #9 on Deadline's list of money-makers last year (even the last delivering a cash-on-cash return of over $100 million), which would seem quite enough to have the other studios still suffering from "Marvel envy." The issue, though, is how long the MCU's films can go on doing that well, with the trend of the returns on an immense investment so evidently downward--and I would add, more at issue than the fate of this one franchise. I cannot say for certain just how much "superhero fatigue" is out there (I actually expected it to have finished the wave of superhero films long before this point), but it seems to me that the broader pattern of blockbuster filmmaking may well be in trouble--like the old-style Hollywood musical in the late '60s. If that proves to be the case then the MCU's problems will be of a nature far, far more fundamental than the mismanagement or overexploitation of a single franchise.
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
Guardians of the Galaxy 3: Revisiting the Ant-Man 3 Comparison
While the Marvel Cinematic Universe has, since the climax of Phase Three, seen a nearly unbroken series of disappointments in various degree, Ant-Man 3's underperformance was of particular concern. After all, the earlier installments in particular were released when the pandemic had the global box office way down from the historical norm--such that the meaning of the earnings of Black Widow, The Eternals and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was ambiguous, while Dr. Strange 2, if not all that had been hoped for given the groundwork laid by the colossally successful Spider-Man: No Way Home and its opening-of-the-summer release, still outdid the first Dr. Strange as it took in, if not a billion dollars, then also not so much less. Subsequently, if in current terms Thor 4 did poorly next to its predecessor Thor 3 (taking in $760 million, against the $854 million Thor 3 made in 2017, and the $1 billion+ it made in 2022 dollars) it was an exceptional fourth installment in its series; while Black Panther 2, if seeing a worse drop (Black Panther 2 made just half what the original did in real, inflation-adjusted terms) was a follow-up to a particularly colossal hit that was in some ways unrepeatable (as a "first" held to be of political significance), and suffered from the loss of the original's star.
There were no such excuses for Ant-Man 3, given a relatively easy February release (as compared with the summertime box office its two predecessors had to contend with), and boosted with the interest of its being the opening act of Phase Five, all as the preceding films did not raise the bar all that high (Ant-Man 2 taking in not much over $600 million globally). However, its real terms gross ended up over a third down from Ant-Man 3's none-too-stellar take ($476 million grossed to date, against the $740-$750 million Ant-Man 2 made in 2023 dollars).
All of this seemed to bode poorly for Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and indeed, after its opening weekend I speculated here about what Guardians would make if it followed an Ant-Man 3-like trajectory from that point on (producing estimates of a domestic gross under $250 million, and a global box office of possibly under $600 million).
As it happened, the films ended up performing very differently. Ant-Man 3 had what seemed a decent opening weekend domestically, and then saw its grosses fall hard (70 percent from the first weekend to the second), while its international gross suffered even worse. (In the end, in inflation-adjusted terms, Ant-Man 3 made about a sixth less domestically than Ant-Man 3, while its international gross fell almost half.) By contrast Guardians of the Galaxy 3 had a disappointing opening weekend, followed by surprisingly strong second and third weekend holds, quickly mooting the worst case scenario (the movie's domestic gross is already well past $250 million now); while in relative terms it did better overseas (producing a 60/40 international/domestic split, versus the 55/45 split seen with Guardians of the Galaxy 2).*
The strong legs in the domestic market, and the relatively robust international performance, will mean that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 will, gross-wise, hold up relatively better to the preceding film in its series than Ant-Man 3 did. Indeed, I suspect its final, inflation-adjusted gross will be a fifth or less down from what the second installment did (with this split a bit differently, the movie about three-tenths down in the domestic market, and just a tenth down internationally, from that mark).
Still, if this is grounds for a sigh of relief on the part of Guardians' backers (a gross of $800 million+ is a lot better than <$600 million), it confirms the general downward trend in the grosses, and profitability, of the MCU, which may be expected to continue rather than reverse (even as some films do better than others). This certainly seems the case with Captain Marvel 2, like Black Panther 2 a follow-up to a film whose success may be unrepeatable (as a politically significant "first," and having hit theaters mere weeks before the highly anticipated Avengers: Endgame), presaging a particularly severe drop, which may be worsened by the headwinds it faces (which I have written enough about previously to not bother belaboring here)--such that I would think it lucky to do as well as Guardians, with all that implies for the MCU's fortunes.
* The 12 days following Ant-Man 3's opening weekend saw it boost its initial three-day gross a mere 76 percent in the domestic market (from $106 to $187 million). By contrast Guardians of the Galaxy 3 increased its gross over its opening weekend take by a much better 125 percent over the same period (from $118 to $267 million, already beating out Ant-Man 3's final domestic take by $50 million, with a good deal more to come).
There were no such excuses for Ant-Man 3, given a relatively easy February release (as compared with the summertime box office its two predecessors had to contend with), and boosted with the interest of its being the opening act of Phase Five, all as the preceding films did not raise the bar all that high (Ant-Man 2 taking in not much over $600 million globally). However, its real terms gross ended up over a third down from Ant-Man 3's none-too-stellar take ($476 million grossed to date, against the $740-$750 million Ant-Man 2 made in 2023 dollars).
All of this seemed to bode poorly for Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and indeed, after its opening weekend I speculated here about what Guardians would make if it followed an Ant-Man 3-like trajectory from that point on (producing estimates of a domestic gross under $250 million, and a global box office of possibly under $600 million).
As it happened, the films ended up performing very differently. Ant-Man 3 had what seemed a decent opening weekend domestically, and then saw its grosses fall hard (70 percent from the first weekend to the second), while its international gross suffered even worse. (In the end, in inflation-adjusted terms, Ant-Man 3 made about a sixth less domestically than Ant-Man 3, while its international gross fell almost half.) By contrast Guardians of the Galaxy 3 had a disappointing opening weekend, followed by surprisingly strong second and third weekend holds, quickly mooting the worst case scenario (the movie's domestic gross is already well past $250 million now); while in relative terms it did better overseas (producing a 60/40 international/domestic split, versus the 55/45 split seen with Guardians of the Galaxy 2).*
The strong legs in the domestic market, and the relatively robust international performance, will mean that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 will, gross-wise, hold up relatively better to the preceding film in its series than Ant-Man 3 did. Indeed, I suspect its final, inflation-adjusted gross will be a fifth or less down from what the second installment did (with this split a bit differently, the movie about three-tenths down in the domestic market, and just a tenth down internationally, from that mark).
Still, if this is grounds for a sigh of relief on the part of Guardians' backers (a gross of $800 million+ is a lot better than <$600 million), it confirms the general downward trend in the grosses, and profitability, of the MCU, which may be expected to continue rather than reverse (even as some films do better than others). This certainly seems the case with Captain Marvel 2, like Black Panther 2 a follow-up to a film whose success may be unrepeatable (as a politically significant "first," and having hit theaters mere weeks before the highly anticipated Avengers: Endgame), presaging a particularly severe drop, which may be worsened by the headwinds it faces (which I have written enough about previously to not bother belaboring here)--such that I would think it lucky to do as well as Guardians, with all that implies for the MCU's fortunes.
* The 12 days following Ant-Man 3's opening weekend saw it boost its initial three-day gross a mere 76 percent in the domestic market (from $106 to $187 million). By contrast Guardians of the Galaxy 3 increased its gross over its opening weekend take by a much better 125 percent over the same period (from $118 to $267 million, already beating out Ant-Man 3's final domestic take by $50 million, with a good deal more to come).
Thursday, May 18, 2023
Will Guardians of the Galaxy 3's Legs Hold Up? (A Box Office Prediction About Guardians of the Galaxy 3's Third Weekend--and Fast X's First)
After a disappointing debut Guardians of the Galaxy 3 had a better than expected second weekend--its gross over the weekend sliding, at last calculation, just under 48 percent from the level of the previous weekend (as against the 67-70 percent drops in first-to-second weekend gross that the last three Marvel Cinematic Universe sequels had seen). The general expectation seems to be that this pattern will continue to hold, with Boxoffice Pro anticipating a $30 million+ third weekend that will raise Guardians of the Galaxy's take to over $267 million.
Assuming this to be the case, what would it mean for the film's overall performance? Let us consider not merely weekends, but weeks. In its first Monday-to-Sunday period after the first weekend, which gave the film its better than expected gross of $215 million as of last Sunday, the film took in about $96.3 million. Boxoffice Pro's anticipation suggests a $52.8 million take in the following seven day period, a mere 45 percent drop. Assuming the 45 percent week-on-week drops continue (so that at the end of the fourth weekend the movie has $297 million in the till, $313 million at the end of the fifth, etc.) the film will top out in the vicinity of $330 million domestically.
Where the global situation is concerned the calculation is trickier. Still, the film's earnings have been a bit more robust than usual overseas. Where the prior two Guardians films made 22-33 percent more internationally than they did at home the recent film, to date, has been making more like 50 percent more. Assuming that holds up the film's international take could be in the vicinity of $495 million. Added to the domestic gross that works out to a global take of some $825 million.
These assumptions are not without their element of optimism. (For all we know the bump the film had the second weekend might not last, the grosses eroding more quickly from here on out.) But they are still within the $700-$875 million range discussed here as plausible last week (indeed, near the middle of that range).
Expect the press to make the most of the $800 million+ gross should it happen, comparing it favorably with the grosses of the prior two films--though the reality would be more mixed. Today's prices are not those of 2013, or even 2017, and in real terms an $825 million take, or even an $875 million take, would leave the movie the lowest grossing of the trilogy by a not insignificant margin (the original Guardians made a little under a billion in today's terms, Guardians 2 over a billion), and it does not do to gloss over the fact. However, it would constitute a more modest drop from the gross of the prior film than has been seen for other Marvel movies (a drop of perhaps a fifth, as against the quarter-drop Thor 4 suffered, the over one-third drop suffered by Ant-Man 3, the drop in real gross of about half suffered by Black Panther 2).
Considering this it seems worth noting the possible implications for the next really major summer movie, Fast X. The Boxoffice Pro prediction regarding the film has broadened--with the floor now lowered to $58 million. Suggestive of a final North American take that may be under $150 million, the more in as the chances of its surprising everyone with even Guardians of the Galaxy-like legs are not great (a "leggy run" is by definition a rarity, and by its third weekend the competition will be thickening, with the most anticipated movie of the summer, the next animated Spider-Man, hitting theaters then), the film is admittedly expected to make three to four times as much overseas. Still, this would easily leave it under the $800 million mark--while the production budget has been reported as high as $340 million (which is to say, almost a $100 million more than a Guardians of the Galaxy movie expected to make at least as much). We now hear that Fast and Furious 11 is due out in 2025--but, barring the greatest studio bull-headedness about sticking to franchises even after they have ceased to pay, that combination of falling grosses and rising costs seems bound to have consequences for those plans.
Assuming this to be the case, what would it mean for the film's overall performance? Let us consider not merely weekends, but weeks. In its first Monday-to-Sunday period after the first weekend, which gave the film its better than expected gross of $215 million as of last Sunday, the film took in about $96.3 million. Boxoffice Pro's anticipation suggests a $52.8 million take in the following seven day period, a mere 45 percent drop. Assuming the 45 percent week-on-week drops continue (so that at the end of the fourth weekend the movie has $297 million in the till, $313 million at the end of the fifth, etc.) the film will top out in the vicinity of $330 million domestically.
Where the global situation is concerned the calculation is trickier. Still, the film's earnings have been a bit more robust than usual overseas. Where the prior two Guardians films made 22-33 percent more internationally than they did at home the recent film, to date, has been making more like 50 percent more. Assuming that holds up the film's international take could be in the vicinity of $495 million. Added to the domestic gross that works out to a global take of some $825 million.
These assumptions are not without their element of optimism. (For all we know the bump the film had the second weekend might not last, the grosses eroding more quickly from here on out.) But they are still within the $700-$875 million range discussed here as plausible last week (indeed, near the middle of that range).
Expect the press to make the most of the $800 million+ gross should it happen, comparing it favorably with the grosses of the prior two films--though the reality would be more mixed. Today's prices are not those of 2013, or even 2017, and in real terms an $825 million take, or even an $875 million take, would leave the movie the lowest grossing of the trilogy by a not insignificant margin (the original Guardians made a little under a billion in today's terms, Guardians 2 over a billion), and it does not do to gloss over the fact. However, it would constitute a more modest drop from the gross of the prior film than has been seen for other Marvel movies (a drop of perhaps a fifth, as against the quarter-drop Thor 4 suffered, the over one-third drop suffered by Ant-Man 3, the drop in real gross of about half suffered by Black Panther 2).
Considering this it seems worth noting the possible implications for the next really major summer movie, Fast X. The Boxoffice Pro prediction regarding the film has broadened--with the floor now lowered to $58 million. Suggestive of a final North American take that may be under $150 million, the more in as the chances of its surprising everyone with even Guardians of the Galaxy-like legs are not great (a "leggy run" is by definition a rarity, and by its third weekend the competition will be thickening, with the most anticipated movie of the summer, the next animated Spider-Man, hitting theaters then), the film is admittedly expected to make three to four times as much overseas. Still, this would easily leave it under the $800 million mark--while the production budget has been reported as high as $340 million (which is to say, almost a $100 million more than a Guardians of the Galaxy movie expected to make at least as much). We now hear that Fast and Furious 11 is due out in 2025--but, barring the greatest studio bull-headedness about sticking to franchises even after they have ceased to pay, that combination of falling grosses and rising costs seems bound to have consequences for those plans.
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