As Americans grow more and more frustrated with the limited originality of new Hollywood movies, most of which seem to be sequels of movie franchises that have been around for years now or redone versions of movies that once were good but are old news now, the interest the public has for the same tired, old content is getting increasingly low. When paired with people tuning out of movie theaters in general since Covid, that’s making for some seriously bad opening weekends, even for high-budget movies.
Such was seen most recently with “Aquaman 2,” a sequel to a not particularly successful superhero movie. It came out over the four-day Christmas weekend and still managed to do terribly, bringing in just $40 million at the domestic box office over the total four-day weekend and just $27.7 million over the two days of the normal weekend.
Variety reported as much in its post-weekend report on the box office results for Aquaman 2, noting that the movie had a $205 million price tag. That makes its $40 million four-day opening all the worse, particularly considering that Warner Bros will keep just half of that opening amount, meaning that the domestic release only made back about a tenth of the movie’s budget over what should have been a big weekend.
Similarly, the movie performed poorly internationally. Over the opening weekend, it generated just $80 million abroad, meaning that its global opening weekend was just $120 million, about $60 million of which Warner Bros will keep, putting the film deeply in the red for now.
Aggravating the situation yet further is that this film was the latest in a string of brutally bad misfires for Warner Bros, with “The Flash” having a dismal debut of $55 million, “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” bringing in just $30 million in its debut, and “Blue Beetle” only making $25 million with its debut, per Variety.
However, there could be something of a light at the end of the tunnel for Warner Bros and Aquaman 2, as sometimes December releases do badly at first but then heat up a bit and gain new momentum as the New Year begins. In fact, that happened with the first Aquaman movie, which only brought in $67 million with its debut and ended up bringing in $335 million domestically and $1.15 billion globally.
But while there is some hope, the $40 million debut was still quite bad and is likely another indicator that the superhero movie industry is on the rocks, with too much content in the genre flooding the movie theaters and streaming services and much of it both being quite bad on its own and even worse once the wokeness imbuing the movies is recognized.
Another data point for that being the case comes from the latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU. That was “The Marvels,” also a sequel, and it had the lowest-ever opening weekend for the franchise, only managing to make about $47 million with its debut. That movie was particularly noted for its wokeness and for conservatives finding it quite terrible to watch.
Featured image credit: By Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61336711
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