‘Higher, Further, Faster’? Far from it.
In continuing to solidify its reputation as one of the biggest duds to ever hit the silver screen, The Marvels has followed-up its record-breaking opening weekend and first Monday box offices underperformances by posting the worst second weekend box audience drop-off in the history of not just the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but comic book movies as a whole.
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Per information provided by box office data aggregator The Numbers, The Marvels only managed to pull in $10,200,000 domestically during its second weekend in theaters – a drop of 78% when compared against its $46,100,859 pull a week prior.
As noted above, this figure represents the worst such audience drop-off suffered by any MCU or comic book film, beating out both the respective 69.9% and 74% faced by previous record holders Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Morbius.
Further, this audience disinterest also left The Marvels to walk away from the weekend as its fourth most popular film, coming in behind The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes ($44,000,000), Trolls Band Together ($30,600,000), and Sony’s holiday-themed schlock-horror film Thanksgiving (which tied Marvel’s latest in box office total, but did so with 800 less available theaters).
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And unfortunately for Kevin Feige and company, the film did not fare any better internationally.
According to a review of early numbers provided by fellow box office data aggregator BoxOfficeReport.com, The Marvels pulled in a lowly `$19.5 million among non-US audiences in its second weekend.
Compared to its opening pull of $96.3 million, should these figures stand, they would indicate that the film saw a slightly-worse international second-weekend drop-off of 80%.
Making matters even worse for Marvel is the fact that, at this rate, the film will likely fail to come anywhere close to making back its (undoubtedly conservatively) reported budget of $220 million.
Further, per Variety’s estimates, The Marvels is also “shaping up to be the first MCU movie to fall short of $100 million at the domestic box office.”
All in all, it seems that The Marvels is shaping up to the be the definitive death-knell of the MCU’s current ‘fly-by-night, find-the-story-in-editing, throw-CGI-onto-everything’ way of film making.
And while both Feige and current Disney CEO Bob Iger have previously signaled some level of recognition towards Marvel Studios’ falling quality, whether or not this film’s disastrous performance will lead to a positive turning point for the MCU ultimately remains to be seen.
