The new Marvel film, The Marvels, debuted at $47 million over its opening weekend. This is the lowest opening weekend for an MCU film.
Franchise fatigue is setting in now. The Marvels is the 33rd film in the Marvel cinematic universe made in the last 15 years. The future isn’t looking bright for the Marvel franchise. There was a time when it seemed like any Marvel film that would come out would do phenomenally at the box office. You could even say Marvel was bulletproof for the longest time. But nothing that is perfect lasts forever as The Marvels has shown. The initial reports expected The Marvels to get closer to $75–$80 million, and its opening weekend was nearly half of what it got.
Ironically, the SAG strike just ended last week, which is not good timing, as actors promoting this film would’ve helped it, especially with the star power of Brie Larson. As of right now, there isn’t a brand new major film at the box office with the same budget as a Marvel film. The Five Nights at Freddy’s film did fairly well at the box office these last few weeks, and it was also released on streaming the same day it was in theaters.
Maybe some of this is post-pandemic theater woes. Superhero films haven’t been of the same caliber as they were post-pandemic. We haven’t had an earth-shattering box office superhero film post-Covid as we did pre-Covid with Avengers Endgame or Infinity War.
Much of this is due to the films being streamed either the same day they came out in theaters or relatively after they were in theaters. Marvel puts their superhero films on their streaming service, Disney+ after the theatrical run is done, so many will just wait and watch them there. DC does the same thing with Max, the HBO streaming app. When the Flash movie came out, it was released on HBO Max, and many people just watched it there.
This year, we saw another kind of blockbuster. We saw the Barbie and Oppenheimer craze that blasted away the competition at the summer box office and shattered records. We also saw the Taylor Swift concert film craze that happened in the fall. It seems like this year at the box office has been other franchises’ spotlight. Marvel will do well at the box office and make a decent amount of money, but not up to the Marvel standard that we have seen over the last 15 years. The year is not over yet, so it’s going to be interesting to see what other movies store at the box office.
