Not to be outdone by Marvel’s commitment to wokeness in the superhero film genre, DC studios tried their hand with the sequel to the surprisingly popular 2019 Shazam! movie and created an absolute mess for their accounting department.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods opened to a paltry $35 million on opening weekend against a suspected budget well into the hundreds of millions, making it seem all but likely that the film will not recoup its production and advertising costs. In the film industry, this is called a floparoo.
And we couldn’t be more thrilled.
No matter how often we remind industries that if they go woke they will go broke, narrative-first 20-something studio interns keep insisting on churning out ever-more tiring, obnoxious content that pummels viewers with propaganda that simply doesn’t belong in escapist art.
If studios wanted to promote their worldviews, they could very easily produce titles around whatever stories they liked. But they don’t. Instead, they shoe-horn as much woke identity politics into supposed mainstream superhero films and audiences keep rejecting them.
Everything is relative, of course. For some movies, $35 million is awesome. Take Jesus Revolution, for example. That film has grossed $41 million so far and is being hailed as a commercial success.
“With Kelsey Grammer starring, the film has seen a domestic gross income of over $41 million, according to Box Office Mojo,” the American Tribune wrote of the huge success. “Jesus Revolution is entering its fourth-week post-release and has seen a level of success that few could have predicted in the industry. According to the DC Enquirer, the film’s total budget was only $15 million.”
It’s that last line that is key. Jesus Revolution knew what it was, who it was marketed to, and did all of that on a practical budget. It will return at least three-fold on its investment.
Shazam!, on the other hand, was made for the masses and for at least $100 million and is now barely breaking even. Historically, the most recent woke superhero films have cratered in their second week and there’s no reason why that trend won’t continue for a movie being destroyed by critics and ignored by fans.
There are also comparisons to be drawn from the original film, which outperformed at the box office by riding the tailwind of word-of-mouth reviews. Breitbart summarized that flash-in-the-pan moment and why it doesn’t seem like the sequel – coming out four years later, no less – appears doomed to not recapture the magic. Breitbart said:
Back in 2019, when the first Shazam! was released during this same time of year (April 5), it opened to $57 million domestic. It went on to gross $140 million domestic and another $225 million overseas. When all was said and done, Shazam! made $396 million worldwide, which is good but not great.
The good news is that moviegoers seemed to really like the movie. I didn’t, but who am I? When people like your movie, that is indispensable. Nothing powers a movie’s success like audience goodwill. Therefore, as we have seen over the last 15 or so years in the superhero genre, all that goodwill tends to push the sequel to a higher box office number than the original.
Naturally, the studio will bait its fandom as toxic and that it’s afraid to have representation in modern films. For the umpteenth time, we don’t care who our superheroes our, we just want good movies to be told. If they make a movie and the characters happen to be this or that, and the story is strong and compelling, then that’s great.
But if they make a movie specifically to comment on leftist politics, it’s not possibile to also be a good movie. And we just want to see good movies.
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