'Kraven' and 'Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim' Both Become Instant, Predictable Disasters At Friday Box Office

Remember - Just because audiences flocked to 'Venom' or 'Into the Spider-Verse' doesn't mean they'll want to see 'Morbius' or 'Transformers One'

Animated films based on properties that previously thrived in live-action have long earned less than their live-action variations. That’s why, on this curve, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was a huge hit when it opened on this very weekend in 2018, grossing $35 million on the way to a $190 million domestic total. The $90 million Miles Morales toon earned $375 million worldwide and won the Best Animated Feature Oscar. It was also so damn good and popular that it spawned a breakout sequel with Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which opened with $123 million in June of 2023 and legged out to $381 million domestically and $690 million worldwide on a $100 million budget. If they ever finish Beyond the Spider-Verse, watch this space. Anyone whining that either film was an underperformer because neither earned as much as Spider-Man 2 ($784 million in 2004) was an idiot.

To paraphrase Dr. Loomis in (the first) Halloween II, you don’t know what animated box office failure is! I attended a near-empty opening day showing of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. Into the Spider-Verse’s opening weekend was 29 times bigger than that film’s $1.2 million Saturday/Sunday debut weekend (Christmas was a Saturday in 1993). That “intended for VHS but shifted to theatrical” extension of Batman: The Animated Series earned $4.4 million from Christmas Day to January 2 and finished with $5.6 million. Adjusted for inflation, its “first three days” ($1.6 million from Saturday to Monday) would be around $4 million, and its domestic cume would be around $13.9 million. You know where I’m going with this. Warner Bros. Discovery’s animated prequel to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings will possibly sell fewer tickets in North America than Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.

The Lord of the Rings: The War for the Rohirrim opened with $2 million on Friday (about what it earned last weekend in its overseas debut in mostly smaller territories), which puts it on a path to earn around $5.5 million this weekend in North America. Spoiler: General moviegoers A) didn’t know how to pronounce “Rohirrim” and B) didn’t give a damn about how Helm’s Deep (the setting of The Two Towers’ action finale) got its name. Yes, the animated, anime-influenced film cost $31 million to produce. Sure, it was green-lit and rushed into production so that New Line could retain the film rights to the J.R.R. Tolkien universe. But not all IP is good IP. In this case, it probably did more harm to the brand than good. Maybe Gollum should have just sat down for a 30-minute interview with Leonard Maltin.

Meanwhile, in more “not all IP is good IP” adventures in failure, Sony’s Kraven the Hunter earned just $4.7 million on Friday, setting the stage for an $11 million opening weekend. Just for comparison, this will be the lowest opening weekend for a big-deal Marvel or DC film since The New Mutants ($7 million in 2020) or, if you want to give that one a pass due to COVID-era theatrical closures, Jonah Hex ($10 million) in 2010. In terms of “tickets sold,” the presumably final chapter in Sony’s embarrassing attempts to craft their own cinematic universe just via Spider-Man characters could be the lowest domestic debut for a brand name DC or Marvel movie since Punisher: War Zone ($4.6 million) in 2008. Yes, this is unfinished business as Sony slowly returns to being a conventional movie studio that sometimes releases Spider-Man movies, but it’s still pathetic.

The problem isn’t that “Oh no, a poorly reviewed superhero movie bombed.” Heck, that has become almost par for the course since Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam changed the hierarchy of power by essentially nuking the entire DC/Marvel superhero industrial complex. Even if Sony had finally seen the light and realized that Venom was the exception to the rule and did not equate to audiences wanting origin story movies based on Spider-Man villains in the abstract, there was no excuse for not knowing better well in advance of the predictable result. Sure, had Morbius not been delayed by two years and bombed on schedule in the summer of 2020, we might not have gotten Kraven the Hunter or Madame Web, but I’m growing tired of pointing out the obvious years before it becomes indefensible “accepted conventional wisdom” only after insurmountable commercial and cultural collateral damage.

Moreover, movies like Kraven should lose their presumption of success. Adolescent (usually white) male power fantasies fronted by “stars” like Josh Brolin and Aaron Taylor-Johnson still have an easier time getting made while other kinds of films make money. Yes, Sony was ahead of the curve in not sending all of its female-skewing non-tentpole genre flicks (Where the Crawdads Sing, The Woman King, No Hard Feelings, Anyone But You, It Ends with Us) to streaming. That this Marvel superhero movie can be greeted with indifference by both paying audiences and the distributing studio inspires optimism. But as Jared Leto still gets to headline Tron: Ares and Taylor-Johnson continues to be treated as a movie star who might play James Bond, while War of the Rohirrim and Madame Web are likely to be viewed as “go woke go broke” failures, the “lessons” of Kraven can’t be ignored.