Well, I may have underestimated the long (fish)tail performance of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, which opened very poorly, and yet held on to a large chunk of its audience from that opening. Combine that with solid international performance, while it will still miss Aquaman 1’s totals by a mile, it may end decently profitable.
This would put it in better territory than the likes of Black Adam, Shazam 2 and Blue Beetle this year which grossed $393 million, $133 million and $129 million respectively. It’s already beaten the last two with $258 million in under two weeks here, and even though it’s short of Black Adam right now, it is tracking to probably hit $400 million and pass it.
I was previously comparing Aquaman 2 to The Marvels, where both films were lower-earning follow-ups to billion dollar original movies back when superhero movies were more popular. But pretty quickly here, Aquaman is separating itself from The Marvels, despite the similar situations. The Marvels ended its run with $205 million globally. Aquaman 2 is already 25% past that after not even two weeks.
Some of this makes sense. The Marvels had two of its three leads debuting in Disney Plus shows not all that many people watched, so it was easy to feel like you were “behind” and couldn’t watch it. It was also not “Captain Marvel 2” which may have been easier to parse and market as a direct sequel.
Aquaman was more straightforward, same cast, direct sequel to a popular original. But it is kind of miraculous it did this well with much lower reviews than the first movie and it was well know that it would be the final nail in the DCEU’s coffin, the last movie from that era before James Gunn’s DCU takes over. And it still drew a better crowd than all other DC movies this year.
There’s just something about Aquaman that appears to be indefinable in terms of its performance. It’s done well overseas in particular, but the first movie being a billion dollar grosser, the DCEU’s highest, still feels deeply strange, and now the sequel, even though it’s crashing among all superhero movies underperforming, it’s not doing as bad as it could be.
If DC can figure out just what went right with Aquaman’s appeal that many other films did not have, that could help the DCU in the future. But it would also not be a shock if they wanted a total break, and the next time we see Jason Momoa onscreen at DC it will almost certainly be as Lobo. Maybe audiences will show up for that, too.
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