Marvel’s Bomb Won’t Blow Up Hollywood’s Formula

livemint.com:

Wanted by Hollywood: World-famous intellectual property that no one has yet thought to make into a movie. Or nearly three dozen movies, for that matter. Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe has been the most successful movie franchise in history, grossing nearly $30 billion globally over 33 films to date.

But this past weekend provided the latest sign that the lucrative stable of superheroes is in need of some rescuing. “The Marvels" grossed a mere $47 million for its domestic box-office debut—a record low for the franchise and a major disappointment even against other recent Marvel movies that have been showing signs of strain. The nine other Marvel movies that have opened since the pandemic closed movie theaters in 2020 have averaged a domestic opening weekend of about $136 million, according to data from Box Office Mojo.

Marvel’s problems are the movie industry’s problems. With the exception of during the pandemic-shuttered year of 2020, Disney has released at least three Marvel movies a year since 2016, with the combined box office of those movies averaging 17% of each year’s total domestic box office, according to data from industry-tracking site The Numbers. But Marvel is hardly the only established, once-bankable movie property looking tapped out.

Paramount’s latest “Mission Impossible" sequel, released in July, has generated the worst global box office in that franchise’s history, once adjusted for inflation. And three movies released by Warner Bros. Discovery this year under its DC superhero franchise have all flopped, with their global box-office totals barely covering their reported production budgets.