Making Sense of The Marvels Box Office Drop

After a ridiculous week of good and bad takes, Commander Shipp attempts to explain the factors that led to The Marvels having such a low box office weekend and why pinning it on one factor is pretty reductive.

(If you’re interested in my complete thoughts on The Marvels movie itself, you can check out my spoiler-free review here)

The Marvels, led by Brie Larson as Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel debuted to middling reviews, a decent Cinemascore, mixed reaction online, and a record-low Marvel opening weekend of $48 million domestically ($111 million worldwide). When I was first writing this, I figured it would likely recoup its budget similar to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) earlier this year. That film opened lower than expected, but climbed week after week this year to the tune of $476 million. However, after dropping to $9 million in its second weekend, it’s clear The Marvels has an astronomical, uphill climb to be successful.

If you look online, there’s a wide variety of responses that are frankly…terrible. There’s the online trolls who are looking to bury this movie and use it as proof that the MCU is dead. There are defenders of the movie claiming it’s a misunderstood masterpiece. There’s folks claiming that Marvel tanked it on purpose, despite all the money they spent on reshoots. And then there’s the revisionist history happening, like people have always thought the MCU was subpar, so this is just normal. Or the one that made me tear my hair out: “since when do we care about box office numbers?” This was said with a straight face on Twitter this weekend and I had to laugh to keep from crying at the absurdity.

With all of these factors vying for the spot light, how can we determine what caused this abysmal debut? Hopefully by breaking each factor down, I can show the unfortunate answer is actually somewhere in-between.

What Affected The Buzz?

First and foremost, we have to address the elephant in the room: The SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes. To be completely clear, I’m not blaming the strikes for this. If the AMPTP had come to an agreement sooner and listened to the demands, the pain caused by these strikes could have been avoided. What this means unfortunately is that the patented Marvel press junket that would have bolstered their new stars was non-existent for this film. The casual MCU viewers not invested in the Disney+ shows didn’t get a chance to interact with Iman Vellani or Teyonah Parris, which would have helped sell these newer characters to the public and generate some interest.

There’s also articles that came out right before The Marvels: one from Variety about Disney’s all-hands meeting to try and chart a new course for the MCU (with one big button issue being what to do about Jonathan Majors). Additionally, there were reports from The Hollywood Reporter about director Nia DaCosta moving onto her next project Hedda (starring Tessa Thompson), but directors shifting to their next film isn’t uncommon once the proceeding film moves to post-production. As DaCosta explained on Jake Hamilton’s podcast Jake’s Takes, the release date kept shifting which was starting to affect her future projects. THR also made a big deal about her missing a cast and crew screening, but I won’t. That feels like an unnecessary dogpile on their part and until we hear there were actual onset issues, missing a screening like that isn’t a major deal.

It’s also entirely possible that Dune: Part Two shifting didn’t have the effect that Disney was hoping for. Warner Bros chickened out (yes I said it) and moved their Dune sequel closer to its own properties in April, likely siphoning off money from Godzilla x Kong in the process. The logic for the remaining November movies was likely this: if Dune moves, we should get those dollars and/or extra attention on our content. Still, it’s possible that the move signaled to mainstream moviegoers to have less enthusiasm about what was coming out this month or lowered the overall energy.

Nonetheless, that doesn’t explain why other movies have done better in the same time period. For example, while The Marvels easily beats out the domestic openings for The Equalizer 3 and The Exorcist: Believer, it got absolutely crushed by Five Nights at Freddy’s (Taylor Swift’s Era Tour concert movie performed similarly to FNaF, but it had months of marketing built in through Swift’s live concerts so we’re not counting that). You could say the same potential for failure with FNaF existed as they couldn’t use their talent to market the film, but it’s possible the large online following from the games built-in high interest.

Perhaps the best insight we can take from the strikes and odd box office debuts is this…

The Post-COVID Box Office Is Still Weird

Do you remember just a few months ago, before Barbie and Oppenheimer came out? Do you remember what the narrative was?

“The sky is falling! Every movie is flopping!”

Well, that’s true partially.

Oppenheimer and Barbie combined powers to prove a major boost for the summer box office with over $2 billion collectively, but The Flash and Blue Beetle stumbled harder than a drunken Arthur Curry cameo, making only $270 and $129 million respectively. Earlier this year, the Super Mario Bros Movie blew up the box office, its $1.3 billion worldwide total only now being surpassed by Barbie‘s $1.4 billion last month.

Other legacy franchises like Transformers: Rise of the Beasts ($438 million) and Fast X ($704 million) did okay over the long run overseas, but didn’t have strong domestic holds. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny pulled in $383 million in a packed summer box office, but it was far from the hit Paramount hoped for.

However, that narrative misses all the insanely successful films this year. Creed III back in February was the highest grossing in the series at $275 million. Disney’s Elemental, which didn’t have a ton of great buzz heading into it had an abysmal opening at $29 million…eventually ended up with $495 million as one of the few children’s movies this summer. For all the hand-wringing about The Little Mermaid‘s opening box office, it eventually made $569 million worldwide over its entire run. That currently has it sitting at 7th on this year’s worldwide box office, just below two other darlings that happened this summer: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

I initially thought Guardians would win the summer box office (which seems moronic in hindsight with the buzz of Barbieheimer) but when Spider-Verse debuted as strong as it did, I started to believe it could catch Guardians. It sort of did; Guardians won the worldwide box office fight compared to Spider-Verse at $845 million to $690 million, but domestically, Spider-Verse edged out Guardians $381 to $358 million.

And so far, this summer mostly reflects how the box office reacted last year, as Avatar: The Way of Water and Top Gun Maverick ran away with the box office much like Super Mario and Barbie did this year. A few legacy franchises do really well even if the content wasn’t great, like Fast X compared to last year’s Jurassic World Dominion. But plenty of films that were expected to dominate a weekend just misfired, like the aforementioned Flash or Indy compared to last year’s Fantastic Beasts or Black Adam. These properties still made decent money, but simply didn’t resonate with audiences enough to sustain at the box office.

With that in mind, when we say the MCU has problems, that’s what we’re really talking about: is the box office significantly different than years past and how long are these films sustaining a box office run? So, let’s answer the real question you’re here for…

Is The MCU Dead?

There’s been tons of articles proclaiming the MCU is dead ever since Disney dual-released Black Widow in theaters and on Disney+ during the summer of 2021. Then, those concerns were promptly quieted for a spell when Spider-Man: No Way Home blew the doors off several MCU box office records, nearly toppling Endgame itself. Since then, while no MCU film has necessarily taken off the same way as their pre-2020 counterparts, they have still been immensely successful.

Here are all 10 Marvel films by overall domestic gross since 2020 in millions: (worldwide in parenthesis and millions, unless otherwise noted)

1. Spider-Man: No Way Home
   • $804 ($1.9 billion)
2. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
   • $453 ($859)
3. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
   • $411 ($955)
4. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
   • $358 ($845)
5. Thor: Love and Thunder
   • $343 ($760)
6. Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
   • $224 ($432)
7. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
   • $214 ($476)
8. Black Widow
   • $183 ($379)
9. Eternals
   • $164 ($402)
10. The Marvels
    • $54 ($161)

We can also pan out and examine the top earners from this group and compare them to the overall MCU box office; of which, 3 of these movies would be in the Top 10:

2nd – Spider-Man: No Way Home
7th – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
9th – Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness

If the MCU is actually dead, it seems weird that 3 of their recent movies have performed so well historically, after a world pandemic affected box offices everywhere. Guardians Vol. 3 didn’t perform better than its previous entry, but it was dang close as Vol. 2 made $863 worldwide compared to $845 with Vol. 3. And we should add context to a few of these movies:

• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a Disney property, released a month before Avatar: The Way of Water, another Disney property that resides in the $1 billion dollar club While Disney raked in money regardless, it’s not crazy to think that having these two so close together likely hurt or affected the last weeks of Wakanda Forever.
• Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has been seen as a failure at $476 million worldwide…but compared to the box office numbers of the previous films ($515 million for Ant-Man and $622 million for Ant-Man and the Wasp), a subpar entry in that up-and-down series doesn’t seem crazy, they should count themselves lucky making even that much.
• Shang Chi and Black Widow get kudos just for surviving their repeatedly changed release dates as they likely could have made more being the first films back from lockdown.

Since The Marvels is still playing, I initially suspected it would catch Eternals or Black Widow over time, but the second weekend drop makes that highly unlikely. This means there’s just no buzz and momentum to carry it through for sustained success over the weeks. Now that we’ve examined the financial / economic factors, we have to address the second elephant in the room…

How Much Did Misogyny Play A Part?

Many of the comments online have been focused on this singular point as if it accounts for everything. And while I’m certainly not going to sit up here and say online / offline misogyny had zero effect on this film, I also don’t have any definitive metric to point towards to prove that it did.

Before I tackle though, a brief aside:

The man-o-sphere HATES Brie Larson (They hate Star Wars producer Kathleen Kennedy too, but that’s a whole other article.)

It just bombed

There are website farms that are dedicated to simply reposting the same, unsubstantiated claims about Larson, saying that Marvel wanted to fire her for innocuous comments back when the first Captain Marvel debuted. I’ve seen YouTubers that haven’t posted much in the way of movie reviews their whole lives but found the time to crank out a movie impression to eviscerate the movie. Clubhouse and Twitter rooms have been ablaze the past week tearing her and other cast members apart like a goat offered up to a T-Rex. If I wanted to, we could just focus on the comments that come out in 2019 as they are basically the same, rehashed nonsense from a group of male commentators holding a grudge.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I’ve seen all of that, witnessed and combatted it regularly to the point of exhaustion, and dealt with these comments on my own wall discussing women in any major role.

Yet blaming this movie’s box office failure solely on that factor doesn’t make sense.

Not in a year when Greta Gerwig’s Barbie makes $1.4 billion dollars around the world. When a cast full of women in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever makes $859 million or Natalie Portman takes up the mantle and brings in $760 million in Thor: Love and Thunder, out-grossing every Thor film except Ragnarok. Think about back in 2019, you had Frozen 2, Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, and Captain Marvel both make $1 billion respectively as they fought off 6 other movies that made $1 billion dollars that year (including Avengers: Endgame at $2.8 billion)…do we actually think the online trolls made a dent in those numbers or did audiences just grow tired?

There could be an element of misogynoir (misogyny aimed at the intersection of blackness and womanhood) with Teyonah Parris, though her performances have typically been praised in the black community, and I would argue the women of Wakanda Forever received more vitriol online than Parris has and that didn’t affect the box office in a measurable way (again, that deserves its own article). It could also be aimed at Nia DaCosta a black woman director (and I think the type of articles THR released showcases that), but again as neither of them were able to promote the film heavily due to the strikes, I doubt a mainstream audience member could name or point them out as a potential problem or friction point for their viewing experience.

Also, in case this wasn’t self-explanatory: the fact that Barbie and other films led by women directors and/or casts were that successful should be your go-to argument for countering any misogynistic trolls. They can’t point to The Marvels as some massive failure of feminism and progress when literally the biggest movie of the year was about tackling the patriarchy through a feminist lenses.

But we do need to see if there’s more to this factor, so let’s see if there’s a way to quantify it…

Can Scores Tell Us Anything About Trolls and Misogynists?

I don’t really like using aggregator sites – as there’s several, well-documented problems with each one – but when used carefully, and with context, they can be useful for examining some trends. On Rotten Tomatoes, the scores for The Marvels sits higher than the critics, which is how most Marvel films go (even when critics really liked a new entry). The critics score is sitting at 62% while the audience score is standing at 83% (as of this writing) which at least indicates that it’s not being reviewed bombed by the trolls (RT to its credit has implemented better controls for that the past few months over the user section).

Yet over on IMDb and Metacritic, those scores are definitely being review bombed. IMDb shows over 10k reviews at 1 out of 10, which makeup nearly 1/5 of total user reviews. That’s utterly insane and baffling; IMDb (which, disclaimer, is a site I publish on a critic) should feel ashamed of themselves for allowing that kind of nonsense to foster. 57% of the negative scores on Metacritic tell a similar story, where we would expect them to be averaged around 5-7 score range, the majority of them are below that, pulling the overall score down to a 3.8 rating.

There is certainly a longer conversation about how much attention people are putting into reviews and scores these days. I could pay part of my salary as a writer if I had a dollar for every commentator that said critics and press don’t matter anymore. However, that would distract from the larger point that review bombing CAN generate negative press. And once the negative press is out there, it can urge those fans sitting on the fence to stay at home or worse, wait for the movie to drop on Disney+ later.

What about the people that actually went to see the film?

One score that may point to the overall lack of buzz as well as cut through the potential misogyny is the Cinemascore. For reference, this aptly named company has conducted exit polls at theaters across the United States for decades. And while a low grade from them isn’t a death blow by any means, it can help us understand where word of mouth may trend after the film’s release.

The Marvels got a B score from audiences; for reference, here’s the scores for every Marvel film that’s been released, in order of box office rank:

1. Avengers: Endgame A+
2. Spider-Man: No Way Home A+
3. Black Panther A+
4. Avengers: Infinity War A
5. The Avengers A+
6. Avengers: Age of Ultron A
7. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever A
8. Captain Marvel A
9. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness B+
10. Iron Man 3 A
11. Captain America: Civil War A
12. Spider-Man: Far From Home A
13. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 A
14. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 A
15. Thor: Love and Thunder B+
16. Spider-Man: Homecoming A
17. Guardians of the Galaxy A
18. Iron Man A
19. Thor: Ragnarok A
20. Iron Man 2 A
21. Captain America: The Winter Soldier A
22. Doctor Strange A
23. Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings A
24. Ant-Man and the Wasp A-
25. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania B
26. Thor: The Dark World A-
27. Black Widow A-
28. Thor B+
29. Ant-Man A
30. Captain America: The First Avenger A-
31. Eternals B
32. The Incredible Hulk A-
33. The Marvels B

(Remembering the COVID caveats I gave for Black Widow and Shang Chi, I am convinced more than ever that those movies would have performed better in a normal theater year, based on these audience scores.)

The above pattern is admittedly small, but if you look at the entire Marvel box office history, the majority of B rated audience movies are near the bottom of the box office list. While we can’t say that a B score will sink your revenue, as evidenced by early A- rated Marvel films like Incredible Hulk or Captain America: The First Avenger being listed lower, it’s clear that films scoring below a B+ can struggle at the box office; none of them have cracked the top 20 grossing Marvel films (Quantumania currently ranks at 25th) and haven’t sniffed the $1 billion dollar mark or even $500 million.

Since this score is taken from actual audience members, it’s likely troll-proof enough because most audiences are unlikely to spend money on a movie they’d like to see fail. And spending money on this film is exactly what trolls want to avoid. So again, this isn’t a perfect metric – as you could still have problematic or biased fans voting as they exit the movie – but the chances are high that the sample taken by Cinemascore represents actual fans of Captain Marvel.

A Harbinger of Things to Come?

Remember when I said the post-COVID box office has been weird? To give you more context:

• In 2019, there were approximately 900 film releases totaling $11.3 billion in revenue domestically.
• Between 2020-2021, at the height of COVID lockdowns and recovery, there was a combined, approximate total of 896 releases for a box office total revenue of $6.6 billion
  • 2020- 456 releases for $2.11 billion
  • 2021- 440 releases for $4.48 billion
• In 2022, there were 498 releases for a total of $7.3 billion in revenue.
• For 2023, we’re currently sitting at approximately 500 releases for a total of $7.9 billion, and will likely end up somewhere around $9 billion when the year closes.

While the theater business isn’t completely back to where it was, it’s certainly in a healthier spot than it was in 2020-21.

When films like Blue Beetle, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, and The Flash all underperform expectations along with MCU films like Quantumania and The Marvels, however, it can be a sign that the whole comic-book-movie genre is facing a recession, even while the overall box office improves (as evidenced by Barbie and Oppenheimer).

The next indication of where this market is headed will be December’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. While its success wouldn’t be a complete referendum on the MCU, given all the DCEU problems and nonsense we’ve endured the past few years, its failure may show us that 2023 was the start of a superhero cooling off period. How long it lasts will be based on how quickly studios can adjust to changing audience tastes and desires and actually deliver us stories we care about.

Final Thoughts

So after all of that, what happened to The Marvels?

Remove all the outrage and news spin and the answer is quite simple:

It just bombed.

It’s not a terrible movie, it’s not a great movie, it’s just okay. When the financials require it to make similar, lofty returns as its predecessors, any missteps can quickly create failure. While it’s fair to want a longer conversation on these ballooning, blockbuster budgets, I can only judge the film based on the metrics currently presented to me by this industry. Knowing how much the film costs, and with its current projection, there’s no way to sugarcoat what’s happening. Anyone who does is ignoring basic math and trends of the theater business.

That doesn’t mean it feels great to watch your favorite franchise have a misstep. Take that from a long time Batman fan…you never get used to seeing Batman and Robin (1997) as the poster child of terrible superhero movies. And let’s be clear, The Marvels is nowhere near that film in terms of quality. But the MCU process has sort of deluded us into thinking they are untouchable and/or incapable of making a mistake – almost like the brain trust over at Pixar was for years before they started to run into issues. Maybe the most sobering analysis of the entire genre, said by David Chen, one of my favorite fellow reviewers says it best:

“The days when mass audiences would just show up for superhero movies because they were superhero movies are over.”

It doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed, or that we’ll never get another superhero movie, but you can’t make improvements without acknowledging ALL the factors that got us here. And maybe, just maybe, this is the wake up call the House of Mouse needs to get things in order.

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