As we discussed last week on That Park Place, there’s no good news in sight for the film industry. The summer has been brutal, with headlines often misleading the fact that many supposed blockbusters for 2021 have turned into some of the biggest flops in the history of the box office. Space Jam: A New Legacy may lose $200 million. Black Widow is likely to lose $100 million. Jungle Cruise is on pace with Black Widow for its amount of loss. However, the first full weekend of August may have been the harbinger for the hurt facing filmmakers.
With box office earnings being the measuring stick of a movie's ultimate success, the old system of total box office return is now obsolete. We need a new streaming/box office metric. We need transparency from @hbomax and @disneyplus moving forward. https://t.co/OBz66jZIuN
— The Popcast Brothers (@PopcastGuys) August 9, 2021
James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad topped the box office with a measly $26,000,000 domestic pull. And while that opening might be awful on its own, what’s worse is that only Jungle Cruise broke double-digit millions below The Suicide Squad. After Jungle Cruise’s $15,600,000, every single movie was a seven-number figure.
Not only are movie studios looking at tremendous losses, but we’re now in the blaming phase where nobody knows what to stick this on. Is it the Delta variant? Is it streaming? Is it that Americans are leaving entertainment? It’s hard to know what is going on given that essentially every source of media is being walloped with horrible ratings. The Olympics just scored historically-low ratings.
For theaters and filmmakers, the next big opportunity to grab major revenues will not be until Ghostbusters Afterlife, a film that doesn’t debut until Thanksgiving!
Update: Thank you to our reader “Britain” for helping us correct a major error in this article! Apologies for the incorrect directorial attribution in the original version.
Um… double check your directors there.