Ant-Man's Opening Weekend Second Worst in MCU History

[crimson5pheonix]

Does it not count as a female led comic book movie?

For all intents and purposes, yes. Our culture has changed a lot in eleven years, and its intellectually dishonest to recognize that how the general public responds to comic book superheroes is one of them.

I'm fairly certain it doesn't work that way. For sure anybody saying that WW will be the first female led comic book movie would be dishonest.

WW won't be the first female comic book movie.

The first one in our current cultural space, which is what people mean when they talk about superhero movies. Again, bringing up Catwoman would be like bringing up 1990 Captain America. Superhero movies have been around, but they've absoluted dominated our culture since Batman Begins was released and brought the raised the quality of superhero films to a new level.

I believe similar words were used to describe 1989 Batman as well.

No, but that's why I paired it up with my next statement, that's there's an industry built around reviews. Clearly somebody is reading these things.

Yeah, some people, particularly the kind of folks who don't go out and see movies inpulsively. Green Lantern was a complete critical flop and made 52 million in its first weekend. Meanwhile, films like Mad Max: Fury Road, which had a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and is still up there as the best received film of the year, can open for less than Ant-Man while spending more. Its broken even but its still has earned less than Jurassic World, Age of Ultron, Furious 7 even though it rated higher than each of them. Its made less than Fifty Shades of Grey, which was absolutely panned. Clearly plenty of people disregard movie reviews when deciding what they want to see. Hell, some people just go to the movies to get out of the summer heat. Critical reception is not the be-all end-all of a film's financial success. Look at most controversial summer blockbuster in recent memory, Man of Steel - many fans were absolutely furious with the film, and it didn't get a great critical reception, but it was a successful film, making 115 million domestically on its opening weekend. Why did people flock to it despite a very mixed critical reception? Some people just want to watch Superman on the big screen. Its the same reason over a million people bought Colonial Marines even after details and even footage about how awful the game was started appearing the week befores its release. You don't have to be one of those people, but you cannot disregard the fact that people can just go watch a movie or buy a game for a flippant reason.

All you have to do is look at statistics.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/03/28/marvel-vs-dc-can-you-guess-which-is-the-better-bus.aspx

There are outliers and summer popcorn movies always do well, but better movies make more money on average. Banking on a statistical anomaly isn't a smart move.

The studio that developed Colonial Marines went under because a million copies ain't shit.

The studio that was contracted to make Colonial Marines was Gearbox. SEGA contracted Gearbox to make Colonial Marines. Who do you think saw all the money from sales? It ain't Timegate, they had a shady deal to be funded by Gearbox. We haven't even seen the aftermath of Colonial Marines yet. Hypothetically SEGA could still file multiple winning lawsuits against Gearbox, which would devastate the studio, possibily kill it off even despite the success of the Borderlands IP.

And the game was a flop. It flopped so hard that they've already had to pay damages in a lawsuit against how hard it sucked.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/11/5993509/aliens-colonial-marines-class-action-settlement

This doesn't seem like a financial success story to me.

Context matters. Movies with better reviews tend to make more money.

Tend. Tend. Mathematically more likely. All that means is that 50.1% of films that have good reviews are considered financially sucessful. Remember this bit from 2013 about movies that passed the Bechdel Test making more money than those that didn't? [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/130983-Movies-Passing-the-Bechdel-Test-for-Sexism-Earned-More-in-2013] Should we start using this as a definitive measure for a film's success? Fuck no, because The Avengers clearly didn't pass the Bechdel Test and it set box office records.

But that's exactly what you're arguing. Marvel's passing up on a financial opportunity to release a female centric comic book movie before DC does (even though DC has already released female centric comic book movies before, but they don't count for reasons), right?

Marvel movies make more money than DC movies despite filling the same niche primarily on the fact that Marvel movies are better. Batman movies from DC tend to make more money than any other DC movie because they're the only ones DC does well.

Man of Steel earned more than Iron-Man 2, Captain America: The First Avenger, both Thor films and The Incredible Hulk. All of those films met a better critical reception. Quality is absolutely not a positive indicator of financial. Mad Max: Fury Road met a better critical and audience reception than Jurassic World on Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and imdb, yet Jurassic World earned five times as much as Fury Road. Why? Because dinosaurs, thats why. That and the fact that "Jurassic" is in the title. You can't mathematically predict what audiences will go see. If you could, the suits in Hollywood could and there'd never be a flop released.

But it did not make as much as The Avengers, Iron Man 3, Spider-Man (which wasn't even by Marvel studios), Guardians, or The Winter Soldier. Because these movies are generally better, so they make more money.

#statistics

The demand is always there, the question is supply. Who wants to make a female comic book movie if they tend to do poorly no matter what the public says they want?

People can attribute various measures of success and failure to different reasons. One of my favourite movies, considered a horror classic and a foundational store for a generation of horror directions, The Thing, was a flop. Why? Because it opened again E.T. Don't you think people might possibly rightfully attribute a flop of a Wonder Woman to various factors other than quality? Maybe it could be attributed to how she's received in Batman V Superman, maybe people don't want to see that Wonder Woman? Or maybe because it has a grim dark NO PARENTS tone? Or maybe because peopel catch on to the fact that WB suck at anybody not named Batman? Or maybe its superhero fatigure? Or maybe its successful because of its grim dark NO PARENTS tone? Man of Steel did pretty well even with a dark tone, whats not to say it would've done better or worse without it? If Wonder Woman fails people will of course speculate that nobody wants a female superhero and if it is a success people will speculate the opposite. Thats all speculation, however. An audience member may go see a movie for one singular reason, people certainly already vote that way, but it would be nonsense to measure the success or failure of a movie on one singular factor. People will most certainly attribute success and failure to different factors, especially if they have some sort of personal investment in the outcome.

Besides, its a moot point altogether because Captain Marvel will already be in post-production, if not outright finished by the time Wonder Woman is released. Marvel Studios isn't going to withhold a movie that will have a budget of at least a hundred million even if Wonder Woman flops spectacularly.

I don't disagree with this, and I don't agree with the opinion that female led movies fail because they're female led, but that's executive opinion (no matter how poor).

 

[HardkorSB]

Ant-Man is also the cheapest movie from the MCU (even Ang Lee's Hulk was more expensive).
I think that makes a bit of a difference.

 

[Kargathia]

If you cannot consider the movie a failure, why on earth make a headline that implies it is?

_ Oh, well. It is a rhetoric question as I already know the answer. It is sad, nonetheless, as this site was once much less sensationalist.

I'd say this is not as much about Escapist sensationalism, as it is about Marvel suffering Pixar syndrome. The moment anything they make doesn't knock it so far out of the park it reaches geostationary orbit, it's a failure.

I don't think Marvel has gone Pixar syndrome yet, since the worst movie they've made was a boring, disjointed but still above average blockbuster (Iron Man 2) while Pixar has had two outright critical failures, as well as two which are 100% reliant on nostalgia that would fall under the "critical failure" category if one did not have them.

Speaking of Pixar, I miss Pixar, they made good animated movies. What happened to them men? Dreamworks is putting out better stuff now, that just isn't right.

OT: I honestly have to say that given everything this movie had going against it, coupled with an abismul ad campaign, the numbers turned out pretty well. I mean it's almost grossed as much as its budget in its first weekend alone, which is pretty good for a blockbuster, even if not the norm for a Marvel movie.

I might need to update my terminology a bit, as Pixar indeed dropped off quite a bit by now, and produced genuine shite (Monsters Academy). The thing I was referring to was that as soon as they released a merely-pretty-decent-movie (Brave), it was treated as a dud.

For almost any other studio, Ant Man would probably be a resounding success, both critically and financially.

 

[Platypus540]

I'm surprised, I and everyone I know who saw it thought this was one of the better Marvel movies

 

[Redryhno]

I believe similar words were used to describe 1989 Batman as well.

You mean the wildly inconsistent series of Batman movies that were consistently mishandled because nobody knew how to handle a movie based on a comic book?

Well, the original Batman is still largely considered one of the best comicbook movies around for a reason you know...and Returns is still what introduced, fully introduced, the world to the wonderful heyday of Burton.

The Schumaker ones are either funny stupid(B&R) or just stupid fun with a great hot new actor teaming up with the 80's hotness that matured with O'Donnel and Kilmer(Forever) with some of the other more acclaimed actors of the time.

I'd hardly call them wildly inconsistent, pretty much every Batman movie with the exception of Batman and Robin and Rises has been positively met for the most part.

I'm not exactly sure where you're getting the wildly inconsistent part from though...

Hell, you can argue pretty well that we still don't know how to adapt a comic to a movie. Cap2 was just a decent spy thriller with a Marvel backdrop, Cap1 just your average war movie with a dramatic edge.

 

[Caffiene]

Speaking of Pixar, I miss Pixar, they made good animated movies. What happened to them men?

They recently released Inside Out, which is sitting at 98% rotten tomatoes and 94% metacritic and had the biggest opening weekend at the box office for any original property (eg not based on sourced material such as a book) ever. Thats what.

 

[Zontar]

Speaking of Pixar, I miss Pixar, they made good animated movies. What happened to them men?

They recently released Inside Out, which is sitting at 98% rotten tomatoes and 94% metacritic and had the biggest opening weekend at the box office for any original property (eg not based on sourced material such as a book) ever. Thats what.

They got that rating purely on their name, just as Toy Story 3 got a 99% on rotten tomatoes despite the fact that the only good parts of the movie are rehashed from the second one.

Pixar's movies, starting with Cars and really beginning to show itself after Wall-E, have taken a downturn in quality that has made it so that it's literally impossible to tell a Pixar and Dreamworks movie apart without seeing who's logo is in the ads, and it's not due to Dreamworks getting better at what they do (though admittedly they have improved over the years, but their catching up and becoming Pixar's equals is half due to that and half due to Pixar's drop in quality).

 

[Redd the Sock]

snip

The thing to remember about phase 3 is that what was announced was at best, a tentative plan. None of those movies had casts, directors or finished scripts, the cultivation of which can easily fall behind schedule.

What comes next is speculation, but i do think it impacts things if true: neither Black Panther, nor Captain Marvel are movies the people at Marvel really want to make, but are movies people such as yourself have made them need to make. This isn't to knock their potential as movies, but much like Ant Man, they go in not entirely sure how they want to treat the characters, or what story they want to tell, so it takes longer to get something that gels. Factor in things like the Widow mini controversy, or even negative reactions to the Supergirl trailer, and it gets worse as those things send the message that you might not want to take a project to try and appeal to that audience because one minor misstep and they'll call for your head.

Spidey comes along, and well, one can't entirely fault Marvel for wanting to go with one of its larger cash cows over the movies they're going with to please the people at the Mary Sue under the best of circumstances. when there's a level of desperation to undo the stigma of the last 3 movies, I'm honestly hoping they don't screw it up themselves in he rush.

I get the impatience, but being so puts the upcoming movies at risk of repeating the mistaks of Catowman, Supergirl and Elektra just to get something out.

 

[UsefulPlayer 1]

This movie was badass. I really hope there is a sequel in the works. This was the first time I was exposed to Ant-Man and I'm definitely a fan.

 

[zinho73]

If you cannot consider the movie a failure, why on earth make a headline that implies it is?

_ Oh, well. It is a rhetoric question as I already know the answer. It is sad, nonetheless, as this site was once much less sensationalist.

I'd say this is not as much about Escapist sensationalism, as it is about Marvel suffering Pixar syndrome. The moment anything they make doesn't knock it so far out of the park it reaches geostationary orbit, it's a failure.

I completely agree. But there was a time that this site would approach the issue more intelligently.

 

[Baresark]

I think it says a lot about the power of the MCU at the moment that it's worth mentioning when a smaller film with a troubled development misses its target by 3%.

I think a lot of people seem to be looking forward to Marvel having their first critical or commercial flop... keep waiting!

That was my exact thought. People are champing at the bit in order to see an MCU film fail. It's kind of pathetic. I personally very much enjoyed it. It was funny and it felt right to have a movie that was not earth shattering at this point.

 

[Vorpal_Smilodon]

Falling 3% short of expectations really isn't what I'd consider "significantly short". Given that this is budget-MCU, it doesn't come off like Ant-Man is some sort of weakness, failure or otherwise a disappointment. I don't know how anybody would expect Ant-Man to be a runaway hit - its a deliberately smaller scale film with fixed expectations. Hulk, on the other hand, was a movie that they invested much more in. Proportion, no quantity decides whether its a profit or not. Green Lantern made over 200 million, but still was a failure because it made barely more than that back.

Anywho, I'm kind of wonder why they chose to do Ant-Man. Maybe to see if they could pull off a budget-MCU film. It makes more sense to put other characters further ahead of him, yet they haven't. Captain Marvel and Black Panther both got moved back an entire year because of Spider-Man when if anything they should've been planned sooner, especially Captain Marvel. All of the (admittedly minor) backlash about Black Widow is only magnified by the fact that they decided to put Ant-Man ahead of her and then delayed her a year for Spider-Man. Since Wonder Woman is coming out in 2017, its probably going to hurt the MCU's potential earnings by striking first with a Superhero thats a woman.

I'm just guessing, but I think it's likely Marvel let Edgar Wright have his pick of their heroes when they signed him and he happened to want to work with Ant-Man. A real shame they ended up parting ways, I bet if he had directed this movie could have been as big a success as Guardians.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

Does it not count as a female led comic book movie?

For all intents and purposes, yes. Our culture has changed a lot in eleven years, and its intellectually dishonest to recognize that how the general public responds to comic book superheroes is one of them.

I'm fairly certain it doesn't work that way. For sure anybody saying that WW will be the first female led comic book movie would be dishonest.

Given the current state of affairs, how superhero movies have radically changed into an entirely separate, going from inconsistent results with no real outstanding successes with plenty of outright bombs bombs into summer blockbusters that top every year's top grossing list. Their production, presentation have changed drastically and people are a lot more open to going to see a movie that is based on a nerd genre - ESPN runs commercials for Pacific Rim, Godzilla and comic book superhero movies and the most popular show on television is a sitcom featuring a bunch of nerds.

The old Batman movie was considered an outstanding success. The Raimi Spider-man movie may well be the template that current super hero movies are based on and it came out in 2002. The only huge gap between then and now is Marvel making it's own movies and the fact that Marvel specifically does them really well.

I believe similar words were used to describe 1989 Batman as well.

You mean the wildly inconsistent series of Batman movies that were consistently mishandled because nobody knew how to handle a movie based on a comic book?

No, I mean the modern classic Batman movie starring Michael Keaton. It was considered the new modern super hero movie that brought the genre mainstream with mature story telling and compelling characters.

All you have to do is look at statistics.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/03/28/marvel-vs-dc-can-you-guess-which-is-the-better-bus.aspx

There are outliers and summer popcorn movies always do well, but better movies make more money on average. Banking on a statistical anomaly isn't a smart move.

I'm not banking on statistical anomaly. You said explicitly that outside factors, like whether the concept is interesting or not, won't matter if the movie isn't good. Your words:

"That depends entirely on if WW is a good movie."

Entirely, as in everything. If you don't want to deal in absolutes, don't deal in absolutes.

Generally, good movies have interesting concepts, but merely having an interesting concept doesn't make a good movie.

You're also using a source that cites Spider-Man as a Marvel film and uses a twenty year old movie in a gauge for today's market. Thats wrong for a lot of reasons.

Not in the way that matters, popular appeal. The movies that tend to do well tend to be more profitable. #statistics

And the game was a flop. It flopped so hard that they've already had to pay damages in a lawsuit against how hard it sucked.

Gearbox didn't pay damages in a lawsuit because it sucked, SEGA paid damages in a lawsuit because it was a clear-cut case of false advertising, something Gearbox's representatives admitted in court and SEGA got bamboozled by Gearbox.

Gamers really gotta start getting things straight regarding the Colonial Marines lawsuits.

Technically Gearbox is still fighting the suit iirc. But the point stands. It's hardly the financial success you make it out to be. It would have been more successful if it had been good.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/8/11/5993509/aliens-colonial-marines-class-action-settlement

This doesn't seem like a financial success story to me.

And yet despite being the worst game of the year it moved a million copies in a month. Million. A million people saw that the game was absolutely being panned and raked over the coals and decided to spent at least $60 on the game regardless. There's going to be even more people ignoring reviews when its an older medium, and thus less plugged in to internet chatter, the buy-in is one-fifth the price and you don't have to have spent at least $300 on a system to get any entertainment value out of it.

How many pre-orders did it have? That's also something that doesn't show up in other mediums. And again, one of the companies that worked on it is going under, another paid out a lawsuit. A million units ain't shit.

But that's exactly what you're arguing. Marvel's passing up on a financial opportunity to release a female centric comic book movie before DC does (even though DC has already released female centric comic book movies before, but they don't count for reasons), right?

I'm not arguing about the Bechdel Test, I'm talking about an untapped audience regarding a film genre.

And what audience is that? An audience that'll only watch female led movies that are released first in an arbitrary time frame?

But it did not make as much as The Avengers

Which is taking four separate heroes and combining them all into one film so that if somebody didn't like Captain America they can still come and enjoy it for Iron-Man.

Iron Man 3, Spider-Man (which wasn't even by Marvel studios), Guardians, or The Winter Soldier.

So it did better than five MCU films and didn't do as well than four MCU films, one of which the main appeal was that if you liked any of one of four separate heroes you could enjoy it because it divided screentime between heroes, something you obviously can't do in a movie about one specific hero. Even counting Avengers despite that, it still did better than five Marvel films that was received better than it and didn't do as well as four, all of which also rated higher. Its smack dab in the middle despite having had a worse reception than any of them, even Hulk. Man of Steel wasn't a failure because it was disappointing, it was a success despite its reception, more successful than it deserved to be based on your litmus because not everybody is concerned with movie reviews.

Star appeal will do that. It also wasn't as profitable as the Superman movie released in 1978. Coincidentally (not), the 1978 Superman got better reviews.

I don't disagree with this, and I don't agree with the opinion that female led movies fail because they're female led, but that's executive opinion (no matter how poor).

Is that executive opinion though? There was one back during Superman IV, which tells you the bar of quality, and two from when superhero films were failures more often than they were successes, let alone runaway successes. Even then the best a movie could hope to be was Blade, which isn't exactly a classic. Nerd ephemera wasn't really commonly accepted in mainstream culture as much as it is today. Batman Begins was the gamechanger, and since then, they've had five films - two Batman films that were successful, one mildly successful, and one that bombed so bad that they're already rebooting it. They haven't put out nearly as many blockbuster superhero flicks as Marvel and the only thing in common with any of the successes is Christopher Nolan. I'm not doubting that execs can be stupid and get the wrong idea, but seeing that they brought back Nolan for Man of Steel I think that they'll probably look towards him as the difference between success and failure.

Well Redd posted this earlier,
http://blogs.indiewire.com/womenandhollywood/marvel-ceo-doesnt-believe-in-female-superheroes-20150504

The CEO of Marvel still believes female led super hero movies are a bad idea because they were poorly received and financial flops (you may notice that all three previous female led super hero movies are in the least profitable table of my previous post). Of course, they were handled poorly (Supergirl came out around the same time as Superman 3, Catwoman isn't Batman, and all of Elektra), but executives see 3 female led movies and 3 flops.

 

[wulfy42]

Way less marketing for ant man then say GotG. We didn't even know it released last weekend...although we are just finally going to see Terminator tomorrow. Not sure if we even will see antman in the theators though....as unlike GotG it just hasn't drawn us in to a comic book cast that we have not previously read/cared about.

I'm sure it'll at least make a profit though, and honestly I'm amazed that anyone thought making an Ant Man movie was a good idea....if they pull it off, more power to them.

 

[FogHornG36]

I don't think this was marketed well, or at-least it wasn't marketed to me.

 

[SecondPrize]

This can't be a shock to anyone. Still I wouldn't whine about it if I had No. 1 at the box office.

 

[Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)]

They got that rating purely on their name, just as Toy Story 3 got a 99% on rotten tomatoes despite the fact that the only good parts of the movie are rehashed from the second one.

Spoiler: WHAT!

 

[P-89 Scorpion]

Though you are right that the theater takes some of that, you're wrong on the amount. The first couple of weeks, the theater takes around 20% ? 25% on average, and some times all the way down to 0%, like with Star Wars. Only around week 2/3 does it go up to ~50%.

That applies to domestic and even then no cinema takes 0% first week, for some films the first weekend can be 60% of domestic gross and even super successful films like the first Avengers it's first 3 days was a third of domestic gross.


For world wide using China for instance the studios see at most 35% first week and then goes down (that's why American films only get 4-5 weeks in China no matter the demand) and the studios generally see 50% first week from European nations before decreasing.