Calling 'Wonka,' 'Napoleon' and 'Hunger Games' Flops Won't Make 'The Marvels' a Hit

A deep dive on how various year-end tentpoles have been treated in the press and why context matters when discussing the box office of various would-be blockbusters

Why was The Marvels treated as a bomb while The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes treated like a hit? Why is The Marvels a flop while Napoleon was considered a relative success? Why is Wonka being treated like a smash while The Marvels is a studio-imperiling flop? Why isn’t Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom being dragged through the mud after its underwhelming $38 million Fri-Mon holiday launch? This seems to be the narrative over the last month and change, with almost every major release being held up as a case of “What about?”-ism. Is The Marvels being treated differently, or is the MCU release just on the losing side of the box office conversation for the first time in its 16.5-year history? 

There is a trend of journalism and/or punditry that tends to wonder why two things are getting unequal treatment without noting the extent to which those two things are not 100% alike. No, Ezra Miller going on an apparent crime spree and still starring in (the mostly completed) The Flash is not the same as Jonathan Majors being dropped by Marvel for future-tense movies or Will Smith getting... uh... to star in Sony’s Bad Boys 4 after slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards. Yes, he was banned from the ceremony for a decade, but that seems fair. If you punch someone at Burger King, you’re probably getting your fast-food burgers from McDonalds for a while.  

That’s not even counting seemingly imagined offenses, such as Wonder Woman not being properly marketed in the summer of 2017, Mulan getting cut from Ralph Breaks the Internet or Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time being pitted against each other. Fear not, this will not be a screed about folks who don’t know what they are talking about trying to set the narrative in pop culture punditry. Okay, the first part was, but the rest will be an explanation of why these other films are/could be box office successes while The Marvels was not. 

The Marvels was indeed DOA

First, after six weeks in theaters, The Marvels has earned around $200 million worldwide on a reported $225 million budget (counting rebates and the like). That includes just $84 million in North America. We knew The Marvels would sink like a stone amid its $46 million domestic debut because it had received mixed reviews and a mere B from CinemaScore. And sure enough, it dropped a near-record (for a major DC or Marvel movie) 71% in weekend two.  

Had it received better reviews and better buzz, it might have legged out like other November MCU releases like Thor: The Dark World ($206 million from an $85 million debut), Thor: Ragnarök ($315 million/$123 million), Doctor Strange ($232 million/$85 million) and... uh... Eternals ($171 million/$64 million). Even the best-case scenario for an early-November MCU movie was around 2.7x its weekend gross. So, lazy and generous math, 2.75x from a $46 million debut would have given the film a $126 million finish.  

That still would have been awful for a mega-budget MCU sequel to a film that earned $427 million domestic from a $155 million debut (a 2.75x multiplier, natch) in March of 2019. Not only were those declaring “time of death” correct, but even an optimistic scenario from realistic precedent would have still resulted in an inferior performance.  

See also folks blaming Lightyear’s box office failure on the controversy over a lesbian kiss. Lightyear earned just $118 million domestically. Let’s say the outcry cost the Pixar film (humor me for a moment) $35 million in domestic ticket sales. At worst it probably cost the film 10% of that figure. However, let’s cut the gay kiss and give Lightyear an extra $35 million. That would still be fewer tickets sold than The Good Dinosaur, which earned $123 million in late 2015, and Cars 3, which bombed with $153 million in 2017. 

The folks like me who have studied these patterns and the numbers that go with them, while also noting pre-release buzz and post-release word-of-mouth, were correct to predict that the film would deflate like a lead balloon.  

Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes cost less and had a wide-open playing field 

Yes, the punditry was a bit less hyperbolic the next week when The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes opened with $45 million amid mixed-negative reviews and a B+ CinemaScore grade (not awful for a would-be blockbuster that’s downbeat and pessimistic from start to finish). Aside from the John Noltes of the world happily declaring that Rachel Zegler (the YouTube Troll Industrial Complex’s latest #1 target) had killed the Hunger Games franchise, the punditry in mid-November was measured optimism. Why? Well, budget and realistic expectations based on precedent.  

Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes cost $100 million to produce, which is (double-checks calculator) a hell of a lot less than $225 million. Context matters. Even if the Hunger Games prequel had proven as frontloaded as a Twilight sequel or late-stage Harry Potter flick, it still could have earned $90-$110 million domestic, which would have been more than The Marvels at (once again) less than half the production budget. And since Lionsgate hadn’t announced a whole new Hunger Games prequel franchise, there was nothing at stake except this one singular motion picture.  

However, with The Marvels having already dropped like a stone in weekend two and Walt Disney Animation’s Wish coming in cold amid the worst reviews for a DWA toon since Chicken Little in 2006, it made sense that Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes might be the by-default event movie of the season. It was a stand-alone prequel with buzzy young stars, a title tune from Olivia Rodrigo plus a grim sensibility that spoke to kids or young adults who grew up amid a Trump presidency and a global pandemic.  

Again, we were right, as the film legged out to $153 million and counting. If it passes $164 million domestic, it’ll be the leggiest pre-Thanksgiving YA fantasy film release ever, including the first Harry Potter film ($318 million from a $90 million debut weekend in 2001) and Disney’s Frozen II ($477 million/$130 million in 2019). Oh, and the Francis Lawrence-directed $100 million-budgeted action melodrama has passed $300 million worldwide, meaning that, yes, it’ll be profitable in theaters.  

Wonka had everything going for it heading into the holiday break 

Why was Wonka hailed as a hit with a $39 million domestic debut while The Marvels was hailed as a flop after a $46 million launch? Well, first, Wonka cost Warner Bros. Discovery and Village Roadshow $125 million. Again, budgets matter. It’s why (for example) The Meg 2: The Trench was a modest hit this summer at $390 million globally while Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was a mega-flop at $384 million. Moreover, Wonka had good reviews, an A- from CinemaScore and a firm place as the go-to family film for the year-end holiday blitz period.  

What is the holiday blitz? Well, with kids out of school and many adults off work for the last two weeks of the year, theaters benefit from two Mon-Thurs frames that essentially operate like weekends. As a result, and this goes back at least 30 years, films big (Titanic) and small (Mouse Hunt), huge (The Force Awakens), less huge (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) and everything in between (Ocean’s 11, The Mule, Second Act, Sabrina, Waiting to Exhale, The Greatest Showman, Tomorrow Never Dies, Dreamgirls, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Lord of the Rings, Jack Reacher, etc., etc., etc.) benefit from unusually long legs.  

Wonka was correctly predicted to have legs on par with – for example – Jumanji: The Next Level which earned $320 million domestically from a $59 million launch on that same weekend in 2019. And guess what? We were right! The Timothée Chalamet-starring musical romp just passed $100 million domestically and is racing toward $300 million globally with lots of chocolate still left in the tin.  

Oh, and if there hasn’t been as much handwringing over Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom since its embarrassing $38 million Fr-Mon debut, most of the “hit pieces” (falsely guessing that Batman would appear, Amber Heard had been cut from the film and that Arthur’s infant son would get murdered onscreen) arrived months before the film’s release. Moreover, everyone knew that the DC Films franchise was at its ignoble end. Finally, its existence as the year-end Imax-friendly mega-budget action fantasy tentpole (and the only thing of its kind in the marketplace) means it could leg out to something approximating a face-saving over/under $350 million worldwide. That wouldn’t make it a hit, but December legs cannot be discounted even for an unquestionable disappointment.  

So, wait, are Killers of the Flower Moon and Napoleon hits or flops? 

Okay, this one deserves a more detailed explanation. Martin Scorsese’s 3.5-hour, R-rated period piece crime drama earned $67 million domestic and $156 million worldwide since opening theatrically in October. Ridley Scott’s 2.5-hour, R-rated battlefield biopic has earned $59 million domestically and $201 million worldwide since opening on Thanksgiving weekend. In terms of raw rate-of-return and conventional theatrical math (theaters get around 50% of the ticket sales and marketing isn’t cheap, so 2.5x the production budget is the goal for eventual profitability), both the Leonardo DiCaprio epic and the Joquin Phoenix war dramedy would be box office bombs.  

Why aren’t they? Both films were produced by Apple, a company worth around $3 trillion, with Paramount getting paid to release the Scorsese flick theatrically and Sony stepping up for the Scott romp. Both distributors were in the black before the first ticket was sold, and both films’ theatrical releases were glorified marketing campaigns for their eventual release on Apple TV+.  

It’s no different than Amazon MGM releasing Ben Affleck’s Air in theaters earlier this year in hopes that the rave reviews, solid buzz and theatrically specific promotional efforts would make it a bigger deal when it arrived on Prime Video. Or, and boy, did I call this one a game-changer. In March of 2019, Warner Bros. offered Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase into semi-wide theatrical release in the weeks before its PVOD debut. Alongside promotional value and the “theatrical movies perform better on streaming than streaming-only flicks” variable, the theatrical releases entice big-deal talent who want more than whatever Netflix offers in terms of multiplex commitment and qualify for year-end awards.  

We may never know if the money spent on marketing and releasing these films pays off in terms of increased streaming viewership or either increasing subscriptions or reducing churn. As frustrating as it can be to see the tech companies playing by different rules compared to legacy studios, they are playing a different game with different goals. Meanwhile, theaters are just happy to have more big-scale projects amid years of unreliable studio slates. The key difference, beyond the challenges associated with getting audiences to a long, adult-skewing, R-rated drama versus a superhero sequel or family-friendly animated film, is that Disney their mega-budget flicks with the intent of making profits via their respective theatrical runs while Apple and Amazon did not.  

Every movie is different 

Yes, some of the online handwringing was perhaps disingenuous and intended for online clout. However, at least some of it is from folks who don’t pay that much attention to this stuff, at least beyond the surface level, and only see a handful of movies (mostly for/from/about white dudes) earning about as much on opening weekend as The Marvels and wondering why the post-release discourse was so different for the Brie Larson-starring sequel. And to be fair, Marvel fans aren’t used to being on the losing side of this conversation.  

In five years, we’ve gone from “Please see any other female-led biggie alongside Captain Marvel” to “Please see The Marvels and not just Barbie.” And the notion of a tech company producing a $200 million adult-skewing epic into theaters with little concern about recouping that raw investment is new enough that it didn’t exist in March of 2019. Moreover, yes, after several years of being held up as the singular leaders of the pop monoculture mountaintop, a $225 million MCU movie is going to be held to a different standard than a $125 million musical fantasy or a $100 million YA prequel, especially when those films can profit theatrically.  

As a wise asshole once said, “In time you will know what it’s like to lose. To feel so desperately that you’re right, that to fail all the same.” And to paraphrase what could be next year’s first big hit, calling Wonka ugly or Napoleon a loser won’t make The Marvels a hot winner.

Yes, it stinks that Nia DaCosta’s (halfway decent and perfectly enjoyable) The Marvels arguably paid for the sins of (painfully inferior) Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and a year’s worth of bad Marvel (and Disney) buzz along with a SAG-AFTRA strike preventing conventional pre-release publicity efforts *and* an overall decline in general audience interest in Marvel/DC superhero movies. No one factor would have sunk the film by itself, but all of them combined did just that. We don’t have to like it, but we do have to accept it.