It’s been a bit of a good news/bad news situation for Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe of late.
The good news is that “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” the latest installment of the culture-dominating MCU, opened with the highest box office total of the year over the four-day President’s Day weekend with a total of $120.4 million.
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But here’s the bad news. Over the past weekend the box office total was $32.2 million, a 69.7% drop.
That’s the second biggest drop in the MCU’s history, and one of the biggest drop offs ever for a film that made more than $100 million in its first weekend.
Are People Tired Of Marvel?
So what exactly happened here?
The things people like, and why they like them, are always tough to predict, but there’s a few possible explanations as to what might be going on.
It might be possible that after 31 films and five different phases, people have had all the Marvel they need. Maybe that’s true, but the company did have four of the top grossing films of last year, so it’s not exactly clear that people have given up on this franchise.
It’s also the case that the “Ant-Man” films, starring Paul Rudd, have always been lighter and more comedic than the rest of the high-octane MCU (even the series director Peyton Reed has said people tell him they’re like “palette cleansers”) so maybe this film just didn’t feel essential. Movie tickets are getting more expensive, and some theaters charge more for opening weekend or big-franchise fare. Inflation continues to put a crimp on everyone’s household budget, and MCU fans may have felt they could just wait until this one shows up on Disney's (DIS) streaming service Disney+ in a month or two.
There’s also more competition at the moment for what the Hollywood Reporter dubs the “young male audience” that tend to show up on opening weekend for superhero films and blockbusters in general. “Avatar: The Way of Water” continues to dominate the box office on its way to potentially becoming the highest earning film of all time, and the self-explanatory action comedy “Cocaine Bear,” had a surprisingly strong opening weekend of $23 million.
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Quality Still Matters
Or maybe the problem is that the movie is bad, according to some fans.
While the reviews for “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” were mixed, they leaned positive overall, but the critics who hated the film, really hated it, and word of mouth on Twitter has not been kind. Fans have complained that the charm of the first two films, and Rudd’s effortless charisma, were lost in a sea of notably shoddy CGI, and the whole thing felt pointless.
But of course, even Marvel doesn’t make films like “Avengers: Endgame” (which made $2.79 billion in its theatrical run), every year, and occasionally there are misfires. But fans leveled similar complaints about last year’s "Thor: Love and Thunder," which left some fans and critics worried the whole MCU is in a bit of a rut at the moment.
It’s too soon to say if this is just a bump in the road, or if the MCU has peaked in the public imagination, and is now being kept afloat by the diehards. (And there are a lot of diehards.) Disney has two more MCU films set for this year, with “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” set for May and the “Captain Marvel” sequel “The Marvels” set for July. If those films underperform or see a similar drop, then Disney might have to rethink the way it approaches its most valuable franchise going forward.
