Box Office Disaster Continues
The worst American Thanksgiving box office in history saw the cratering of the latest Disney/MCU films. When this kind of failure is covered by the mainstream you know it's catastrophic. This reality comes as a shock to the few people still riding the MCU train (I've run into disbelief and bafflement over The Marvels failure, for instance). Let's briefly look at their performance:
- The Marvels - 202 (domestic weekend drops: -78%, -37%, -60%, -46%)
- Wish - 106 (domestic weekend drop: -61%, -31%)
Both films suffered from negative word of mouth and both are complete financial failures--The Marvels might not limp past the Dungeons & Dragons bomb (208) and has no hope of reaching Ezra Miller's The Flash (270; losing out to an alleged kidnapper and abuser has to sting). Even the shills are talking about the failure and expressing that the lead characters in The Marvels (Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, and Monica Rambeau) may be cut going forward--hints of the former were occurring weeks before release from Brie Larson in particular. The incredibly expensive Wish is yet another flop on Disney's animated side (cf), who haven't had a hit since Toy Story 4 (2019) and Frozen 2 (2019). This echoes the MCU's only success after Phase Three, which was also a sequel (Spider-Man 3 in 2021). The belief is the two films are going to collectively cost Disney 500 million dollars, which is incredible.
Related in terms of box office, the Hunger Games prequel has had very mild weekly drops (-35%, -51%, -34%), but started so poorly it could still lose money for Lions Gate (currently at 260 worldwide). Irrespective of where it ends up, it hasn't met projections (the last franchise film, in 2015, made 653, which is 849 in today's dollars).
Speaking of the Rachel Zegler vehicle, I speculated that she had been told to stop making inflammatory comments recently and this theory is backed by recent comments where she now claims to love classic Disney IP, despite saying the opposite just months earlier. The new comments are clearly public relations with her true feelings laid out in the multiple interviews previously. The negative reaction to her has become so large that it threatens the box office of her future projects and Disney is attempting whatever damage control it can before the next release (just as the WB silenced and hid Ezra Miller in the lead-up to The Flash in the hopes of saving it).
As someone who suffered through Falcon and the Winter Soldier (my review) it comes as no surprise that Captain America 4 has tested even lower than The Marvels. Apparently the plot was meant to be a January 6th parallel (pre-lawsuits/footage release, clearly). This included Falcon repeating his nonsensical 'do better' speech from D+, but I suspect thw plot has little to do with the poor response. The film is now going through emergency reshoots, but as these haven't been helping the modern day MCU, they are most likely a waste of time and money.
The unintended disaster that has been James Gunn's public statements as DCEU clown-in-chief continue (cf). Recently he declared cameo porn as one of the worst elements in recent super hero films. This comment comes after his lavish praise for The Flash, which is completely dependent on cameo porn. In his short tenure Gunn has said so many contradictory things it feels like we have to ignore what he says and focus on what he does instead.
The unwanted Star Wars D+ show is filmed and will be inflicted on audiences in 2024. I bring it up not because of the lack of quality (which won't be any worse than the other SW series), but because its creator, Leslye Headland, has somehow avoided any fallout whatsoever from being Harvey Weinstein's personal assistant. In that position she was well aware (despite her denials) of what he was up to (an open secret in Hollywood, as we now know) and pointedly did not go into that in her 'tell-all' play in 2012. How she's completely skated from that scandal is unclear, although she ticks three boxes for an ESG score (female, Jew, and a lesbian) so perhaps that is enough. Regardless, the show had a difficult production and some insiders (cf) claimed it was never coming out. How will it do? Given that Ahsoka just crashed and burned without the same drawbacks, I'd have to think horribly.
Speaking of ESG/DEI, while the former (as a label) seems is going away, the people behind it haven't changed so the efforts continue. How can you push an agenda if the public rejects it? BlackRock has talked repeatedly about forcing behaviour through its funding, but thus far that investment has only made limited inroads among the wealthy elite (screaming at the lower classes has never been the way to change minds--apparently Larry Fink never read 1984 or, if he did, didn't understand it). The route they should have followed is what Larian Games has successfully done with Baldur's Gate 3. That game is suffused with ESG nonsense (echoing the failed Dungeons & Dragons movie), however, it handled it as well as can be. How did they do it? The politics are largely background and it mostly avoids demeaning and screaming at its opponents. Larian also made a choice that's very out of step with modern games (and TV/film) by having a largely non-ESG cast, ergo its DEI placements are mostly secondary characters. One of the primary signs of how well BG3's approach has worked is that the tiny minority who hated the game come from both sides of the political spectrum. There are plenty of things within the game that are absurd, but they can be ignored because everything else is excellent. I don't see any evidence that larger companies are smart enough to follow this approach--we're on course for more screaming and virtue signaling.
This is just an observation. One of the stranger things I run into when discussing the relative success of something is the unwillingness of those who like (or dislike) them to accept financial reality. This has nothing to do with the quality of a product (that's a separate discussion), but there's stubborn resistance in accepting failure (something encouraged by shills, although they can't completely ignore it, cf). These tend to be the kind of people who think putting a BLM sticker on their car tangibly improves race relations, or that a Ukrainian flag on their Twitter bio helps the war effort; etc (look at me, look how good my intentions are). Whether I like something or not, how the public receives it (short-term and long-term) is interesting: it says something about the tastes of the general audience and the culture at large. For example, even though I think the Star Wars prequels are terrible films, it remains true that many younger people who grew up with them enjoyed them then and still do. That's interesting and worth exploring. I don't see any value (except rhetorically) in simply rejecting that fact (and I can at least credit how most prequel fans admit they are flawed).
This article was written by Peter Levi
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