The Marvels’ box office run has come to an end after what is an indubitably disappointing 4 weeks for Disney and the MCU – and here’s why.
Disney has made it official – The Marvels’ box office run has come to an end after just 4 weeks, drawing a line beneath the unfortunate performance of the latest MCU release. The decision comes after a run that saw The Marvels breaking records in the least desirable way as it became the lowest-grossing MCU movie of all time despite being far from the worst MCU installment. While The Marvels will continue to play at cinemas, Disney’s announcement means it will not continue reporting on its box office performance.
As it stands, The Marvels’ worldwide box office gross sits just below $200 million against a production budget of $275 million. There are multiple theories on why The Marvels floundered so drastically, including the onset of worldwide superhero fatigue, a lack of interest in the movie’s main characters, and the fact that the SAG-AFTRA strikes curtailed marketing efforts substantially before it was released. Disney CEO Bob Iger also suggested that filming throughout the pandemic played a large factor, as executives could not efficiently oversee its production, which has drawn its own criticism for supposedly deflecting blame away from Disney.
Disney Doesn’t Expect The Marvels To Make Much More Money At The Box Office
Whatever the root cause of the debacle, Disney has decided to stop reporting on the box office performance of The Marvels as it projects that it won’t make enough money over the following weeks to be worth reporting on. The woes of The Marvels were compounded by its second week in cinemas, where it proceeded to break another unwelcome record: the largest drop in second-week attendance of any Marvel movie. Since then, viewership has continued declining, spurring the studio to cease reporting entirely.
This suggests that Disney doesn’t expect the holiday season to inject life back into the movie. Its fourth weekend earned just over $2 million, and the studio seems to expect that it will only decline from there despite audiences heading towards the holidays with freer schedules and a supercharged hankering for entertainment. Despite this, Disney will continue to claw back as much of its losses as possible over the coming weeks.
Will Disney Release The Marvels On Streaming Soon?
Despite Disney’s pessimistic prognosis, the projected poor performance of The Marvels in cinemas is not enough to warrant shifting it to its streaming platform. The studio is reportedly going to continue screening the movie until 2024 (via Variety), meaning that it will not migrate to Disney Plus before the New Year. This isn’t surprising, given that Disney’s decision to stop reporting on figures does not equate to The Marvels pulling in no money whatsoever, and the movie is unlikely to garner enough new subscribers over the holidays to make switching platforms worthwhile.
This gives room for What If…? Season 2 to steal the limelight at the tail-end of 2023. As the final MCU release of the year, Marvel is no doubt looking to this spin-off show to at least end what has been a rather disappointing year for the MCU on a high note. Echo, meanwhile, is set to keep the ball rolling at the start of 2024 with a slated release date of January 10. With this in mind, it seems more likely that The Marvels will drop sometime soon after Echo, with Deadpool 3 poised to be the MCU’s only cinematic release of 2024.
