The Lowest MCU Opening of All Time

'The Marvels' sets a new low for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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Marvel/Disney

Box Office Round-Up

This weekend saw the opening of The Marvels, the 33rd film of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” (MCU) and the sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel. While the first one earned $153 million in its opening weekend, the sequel came in below expectations, and those expectations were revised downward all weekend. Current tally? $47 million domestically, good for the lowest-ever MCU opening (below previous lows The Incredible Hulk and Ant-Man) and the first one to debut with $100 million less than its first installment.

Basically every sort of saw this coming and it still managed to do worse than their expectations. Usually sequels, even bad ones, do better than their predecessors, because that’s how name recognition works. Marvel probably thought they’d hacked that model, taking numbers off of sequels and having all their movies tie into each other, such that new titles didn’t feel like new titles (where you’d normally have to wait for it to penetrate the public consciousness then cash in on the sequel). Mostly they just felt, by design, like “the latest Marvel thing.”

While new Marvel movies benefitted from this for a long time, now it’s starting to backfire, as even people who loved Captain Marvel (I don’t know any, but surely there must be some) probably didn’t realize The Marvels was actually Captain Marvel 2. To most people it was just “The Latest Marvel Thing,” and we’ve already seen so many Latest Marvel Things that the release of one ceased being an event worth caring about. How many of us can even name the Avengers subtitles in chronological order anymore? I can’t, and I was a professional film critic who had to see all of them.

The MCU movies have long been appealing more and more to the Marvel superfan, the moviegoer who can actually keep track of how the characters in 33 different movies relate to each other, but doing so at the expense of the regular moviegoer. 33 movies is a lot for any normal-ish human being to give a shit about, and now we’re finally starting to see the “Marvel superfan” demographic shrink. There’s probably a paralell to multi-level marketing here somewhere, because how many superfans can there possibly be? You can squeeze more and more money from them but eventually they’re going to run out.

Marvel’s defenders are surely going to blame this bad box office on the SAG-AFTRA strike for keeping The Marvels actors from doing a proper press tour. But that raises the question of how much seeing Brie Larson on Jimmy Fallon or whatever actually makes people want to see the movie. I can’t imagine it’s a huge effect. Plenty of other people will surely paint this failure as the latest referendum on “wokeness,” but their hearts won’t even be in it. I doubt the average moviegoer has an opinion on whether The Marvels was woke or not, they were probably only vaguely aware of its existence to begin with.

The only other major release this weekend was Journey To Bethlehem, a “live-action Christmas musical adventure” that earned $2.4 million from 2,002 theaters, to The Marvels’ $47 million from 4,030. That’s been the release pattern for a few weeks now—one huge Hollywood piece of crap sucking up all the oxygen and one anti-Hollywood, religion-themed piece of crap making a few bucks from group sales to churches. The “arthouse” stuff (which used to just be called “movies”) like Priscilla, The Holdovers, and Dream Scenario are all doing pretty well on a per-screen basis.

As the streaming ecosystem slowly transforms into something more closely resembling cable, maybe movies too will slowly transform into something more closely resembling the pre-MCU system, with more medium-budgeted films made for more medium-sized profits for a broader cross section of moviegoers. That might be hard now that the “average moviegoer” has largely gotten out of the habit of going to the movies regularly. The big studios have only themselves to thank for that. Big streamers occasionally tried to patch the hole by losing money on Scorsese movies, but that free tech money has mostly dried up too.

Right now it seems like the Marvel business model (which every other studio was trying to copy for a time there) is going away, with nothing much jumping in to replace it (Blumhouse horror movies?).

Whatever happens, the growing pains are going to be weird as hell.