I find myself being apologist for a few underperforming MCU movies, specifically Eternals which I think deserved better reviews and box office results. I have also said the same thing for The Marvels, which reviewed on the low end of MCU movies despite being a lot of fun, but its box office returns? Just utterly disastrous, well beyond what’s happened with any other underperforming Marvel feature, and even the horrific Flash from DC this past year.
Deadline has a list out of the biggest box office losses of the last year and The Marvels tops the list by a wide margin, losing $237 million for Disney with a typically bloated budget of $455 million, meaning it needed half a billion dollars to get past breaking even. Given that Captain Marvel grossed over a billion, that seemed like it should certainly be possible, but this was the wrong movie released at the worst possible time, despite the fact that it’s really actually pretty good. Its total losses ended up actually being more than its entire box office haul.
Here is the full list of bombs with The Marvels on top:
- The Marvels: $237 million loss
- The Flash: $155 million loss
- Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: $143 million loss
- Wish: $131 million loss
- Haunted Mansion: $117 million
You may notice one particular thing about this list, that four of the five movies on it are from Disney, with just The Flash being from Warner Bros. And it’s across essentially five different genres, a superhero film, an action film starring a classic character, an animated film and a live-action kids film. Just bombs across the board.
As for the MCU specifically, despite “superhero fatigue” I don’t expect that will carry over to something like this year’s Deadpool and Wolverine, which really should do massive numbers even despite an R-rating. Marvel also has high profile projects coming up like Fantastic Four. However, I am less convinced that Captain America: New World Order or Thunderbolts are going to do well. This Disney list also does not include absurd Disney Plus TV projects like the $210 million spent on the all-time terrible Secret Invasion, which doesn’t have box office results, but was clearly a massive waste of money.
Disney needs to get it together, as this list demonstrates, but who knows how long it may take to do that.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
