I am not sure there could have been a more ignominious end to the DCEU than how Aquaman 2, or Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is performing after its release over a week ago.
Aquaman 2 opened with $27.7 million domestically, well under half the $67.8 million opening for the original Aquaman. But it’s the overall box office totals that are especially dire, as the film has made just over $138.5 million worldwide. That is about 12% of Aquaman 1’s final total of $1.1 billion in 2018, where it is the DCEU’s highest grossing entry.
The counter to this is that it perhaps is too soon to run these numbers, as it just came out right? Well, a few extra factors to consider. It is already out in a ton of major markets, so there are relatively few potential surges that can still happen outside places like Korea and New Zealand, which can only add so much.
Most importantly Aquaman 2 has already launched in China, where it made $30 million in its opening, again, far below the original’s opening at $93 million there, doing even worse there than domestically, in context. Aquaman 1 went on to make $292 million in China, a figure Aquaman 2 will not come within a mile of.
Next, what DC, and many blockbusters, have been doing lately are these incredibly short theatrical windows, so the clock is ticking quickly. WB has been doing something like 39 days windows from theatrical to streaming, so Aquaman 2 has about a month left to add to its total. So it will climb to what, maybe 20% of the original, if that?
Of course this is not exclusive to DC, as we have an extremely direct comparison over at Marvel with The Marvels, which at a $205.6 million global gross, the final figure, that is 18% of Captain Marvel’s $1.13 billion total. Aquaman 2 has the advantage of being a true sequel, not a team-up piece from other TV shows you theoretically needed to watch beforehand, but it also has the disadvantage of being the last dying gasp of the DCEU coming after a string of other high profile box office failures from Shazam 2 to Blue Beetle. There was really no way it was going to avoid its fate, even if it did review well (which it didn’t, as at 35% on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s one of the DCEU’s lowest rated films).
Even before the movie was out, Jason Momoa appeared to be shrugging it off, seemingly knowing that it would perform badly which meant no more Momoa Aquaman being carried over into the DCU. But he seems supremely confident, as does WB, that he will continue on there, with the most common, obvious casting being Lobo in Gunn’s new universe, though that has not been officially announced.
We’ll see what the end total ends being but man, what a final string of movies for WB’s DCEU here.
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