Superhero movies save the 2017 summer box office 0

[Bosco685]

So much for superhero movies being so-yesterday and burning out.

Wonder Woman And Spider-Man Prevented A Summer Box Office Disaster

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If you look at the domestic box office, the weight of the summer box office was carried almost exclusively by the three big superhero movies that kicked off the first three months.

 

If you take out Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 ($388 million), Wonder Woman ($405-$415m) and Spider-Man: Homecoming ($315-$325m), you leave a giant crater in the domestic summer box office.

 

Among live-action features, the biggest-grossing non-comic book offering was Walt Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales at $171 million, although I’m presuming that Chris Nolan’s Dunkirk ($133m after 17 days and going strong) will eventually cross said arbitrary milestone in a few weeks. The next-biggest live action grosser of the season is 20th Century Fox's War for the Planet of the Apes, which will struggle to hit $150m domestic following a $200m+ cume for its immediate predecessor. The rest of the would-be live action biggies (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Alien: Covenant, Baywatch, The Mummy, Transformers: The Last Knight, Valerian and The Dark Tower) have underperformed or outright flopped. And among other genre films, Girls Trip was the lone breakout comedy, Despicable Me 3 was the lone big animated smash (Cars 3 and Captain Underpants stumbled), and we’re still waiting for a big horror movie.

 

To be fair, we had a handful of sleeper performers in Sony's Baby Driver ($100m+), Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. and MGM's Everything, Everything ($32m), Amazon and Lionsgate's The Big Sick ($33m+) and 47 Meters Down ($41m). You can debate whether Focus Features' Atomic Blonde (a likely domestic total of $50m) should have been bigger, but even at a $30 million budget, the Charlize Theron picture is going to have to count on overseas muscle to break into the black. Ditto Lionsgate's All Eyez On Me which snagged just $44m domestic on a $40m budget from a $26m opening weekend. The likes of Diary of Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul, Snatched, Rough Night, The House and Detroit all stumbled out of the gate. Maybe summer will end on a positive note if Annabelle and The Hitman’s Bodyguard kick butt over the next two weekends. If last summer was all about comic book movies and animated hits, this summer was even more single-minded.

 

If not for the superhero movies this summer would have been a domestic disaster. As of yesterday, the total domestic grosses of the 2017 summer slate is around $3.081 billion between May 5, 2017 and Aug. 6, 2017. And about $1.083b, or 35% of that came from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man: Homecoming. Tossing in Dunkirk, Despicable Me 3 and Pirates 5 gets you another $545m, which makes the top six movies (yes, Dunkirk will eventually pass Cars 3) responsible for 52% of the entire domestic box office from the beginning of May to the beginning of August. If you take those three comic book movies out of the equation, you get a running domestic total of just under $2b thus far, and I don’t think the August slate is going to add much to the equation between now and Labor Day.

 

[ComicConnoisseur]

2 hours ago, Bosco685 said:

So much for superhero movies being so-yesterday and burning out.

Wonder Woman And Spider-Man Prevented A Summer Box Office Disaster

 

I agree. Without the super hero movies the Hollywood box office would be in trouble. I wonder if this means more superhero movies? I could see more because Hollywood always likes to copy what is successful. This could be good news for the Valiant Universe.

[Bosco685]

36 minutes ago, ComicConnoisseur said:

I agree. Without the super hero movies the Hollywood box office would be in trouble. I wonder if this means more superhero movies? I could see more because Hollywood always likes to copy what is successful. This could be good news for the Valiant Universe.

As long as studios don't buy into a franchise, and then want to do it all on the cheap so they can benefit from all that 'superhero money' they assume comes by default.

[valiantman]

My hope for the Valiant Universe movies (remembering that Valiant is 1% of the comic book market) is that they produce solid movies on conservative budgets.  If they can make $50M to $90M on a budget of $20M, that would be great.  If they somehow spend $80M or more on a movie, I'm very concerned that they will be looking at Valerian-style returns, since it has been shown (with Valerian) that audiences aren't going to spend $100M box office if they don't recognize the property (or the company behind it).