The Walt Disney Company and Marvel Studios have officially given up on the Brie Larson-led The Marvels film at the box office.
Brie Larson as Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers in Marvel Studios’ THE MARVELS. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.
Variety reports that the company sent out a memo to certain press outlets announcing, “With ‘The Marvels’ box office now winding down, we will stop weekend reporting of international/global grosses on this title.”
The announcement comes after the film only grossed $2.5 million in its fourth weekend at the domestic box office.
(L-R): Iman Vellani as Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan, Teyonah Parris as Captain Monica Rambeau, Brie Larson as Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers, and Zawe Ashton as Dar-Benn in Marvel Studios’ THE MARVELS. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.
According to The-Numbers, the film only grossed $80.7 million domestically and $116.3 million internationally for a global gross of $197 million globally.
Those numbers make the film the worst grossing Marvel Cinematic Universe entry in history. The previous worst performing film was 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. It grossed $265.5 million without adjusting for inflation.
Just for comparison’s sake, The Incredible Hulk grossed $4.8 million in it fourth weekend. The film would be in theaters for 12 weeks. It was released in June and stayed in the box office until August.
Looking at more recent MCU films that struggled such as Black Widow show just how terribly The Marvels has performed. Black Widow grossed $183.6 million domestically and another $196 million internationally for a global gross of $379.7 million.
The film grossed $6.4 million in its fourth weekend. It stayed in the box office for 14 weeks from July to October.
(L-R): Iman Vellani as Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan, Brie Larson as Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers, and Teyonah Parris as Captain Monica Rambeau in Marvel Studios’ THE MARVELS. Photo by Laura Radford. © 2023 MARVEL.
Box office analyst OMB Reviews notes, “It’s getting close to $200 million worldwide so, hey, it still has a chance of crossing $200 million. Still going to be a $200M+ flop by the end of the day though.”
The reason the film will be a flop is due to its massive production budget. Caroline Reid at Forbes previously reported the film’s production budget clocked in at $274 million as of September 2022.
However, Reid noted Marvel Studios did receive a $55 million tax credit. That brought the film’s net budget down to $219.8 million.
Yet, the production budget did not include any production expenses in 2023 and did not include post-production expenses either. Reid explained that film’s budget “is expected to soar in the next set of financial statements as almost a year of post-production and extensive reshoots took place after the latest financial statements were filed.”
If the film’s total costs come to around $300 million, which is highly likely, the movie will like lost The Walt Disney Company not just $200 million, but upwards of $200 million. At a $300 million production budget, the break even for the movie is somewhere around $750M+ when you factor in the cut that theaters take from the box office grosses as well as Disney’s advertising spend for the movie.
(L-R): Brie Larson as Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers and Iman Vellani as Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan in Marvel Studios’ THE MARVELS. Photo by Laura Radford. © 2023 MARVEL.
Whether or not The Walt Disney Company and Marvel Studios will learn the right lessons from this massive failure, time will tell. But as it stands now it does not appear to be the case.
Disney CEO Bob Iger recently placed the blame on the film’s failure on Covid-19 and a lack of executive oversight.
Iger stated, “Well, The Marvels was shot during Covid. There wasn’t as much supervision on the set, so to speak, where we have executives there really looking over what’s being done day after day after day. And that was a result of mostly of Covid, but at the same time we increased our output tremendously to feed the streaming platforms. Too much, by the way. Definite mistake.”
“Quality needs attention to deliver quality,” Iger continued. “It doesn’t happen by accident and quantity in our case diluted quality and Marvel suffered greatly from that. So there are different reasons. And I’m the first, I’ve been very public about it and I would say right now my number one priority is to help the studio turn around creatively.”
Iger then hedged, “Now, let’s also put it in perspective. We set the bar so high. Year after year after year, we had the best performance in the business, probably for a decade. And I’m not sure another studio will ever achieve some of the numbers that we achieved. We got to the point where a film didn’t do a billion dollars in global box office we were disappointed. That’s an unbelievable high standard. And we’ve got to get more realistic.”
(Center, L-R): Zawe Ashton as Dar-Benn and Daniel Ings as Ty-Rone in Marvel Studios’ THE MARVELS. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.
What do you make of Disney throwing in the towel for The Marvels at the box office?
Womp, womp!