What Do Ant-Man’s Box Office Numbers Tell Us?
I’m seeing widespread panic this morning because of Ant-Man’s conservative take at the box office this past weekend. That conservative amount? $58 MILLION DOLLARS. Which was enough to give Marvel its 12th entry to debut at number one. Early projections had the movie tracking at around $65 million, so $58 million is a tad under Disney’s expectations, but not enough of a reason for Marvel President Kevin Feige to start shopping his summer home in Malibu. “Superhero Fatigue” is the buzzword spreading around the internet this morning like a wildfire. So, let’s all take a step back, breathe, and analyze what happened at the box office this weekend.
First and foremost, Ant-Man had some HEAVYWEIGHTS competing with it at the box office for your money. Minions, which was only in its second weekend, is still taking over the world one IHOP commercial at a time. Trainwreck, had great marketing, a well known director in Apatow, and legit recognizable faces in Schumer, Hader, and even Lebron James. Also, Inside Out and Jurassic World continue to pull in solid earnings given the fact they were released weeks ago. I believe, because of extremely positive word of mouth and reviews (79% on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.1 on IMDB), Ant-Man won’t see a huge dip in its second weekend. A $35 million second weekend would be exceptional. Add in the overseas box office and it will already be in the green on its modest (for a Marvel film) budget of $130 million.
There’s enough newness on the horizon in the superhero genre to keep it fresh and keep audiences engaged. Suicide Squad looks like nothing we’ve ever seen before, Deadpool is going for a hard R rating, and Marvel getting their hands on Spider-man may finally be the jolt the franchise needs to give us the Spider-man movie we’ve been craving (Raimi ALMOST did it for me but not quite). So all of this talk of Superhero Fatigue is just lazy internet writing, because when you look deeper, we have so much to look forward to in this genre. I for one can’t wait! So sorry Alan Moore, who recently made his biggest contribution in years saying that superheroes are a “cultural catastrophe”, this genre is here to stay and I could not be happier with where it is heading.
