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

[Mazinger-Z]

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.

Here's the thing with the Batman movies from the 80s and 90s. Tim Burton put his usual charm on the Batman and got a very good film that stuck solidly with the dark nature of Batman. The movie was restricted by the fabrication technology of the 90s in that Batman was a rubber suit that Keaton found very hard to move in so his fighting style was restricted.

Anyway, based on the commercial success that comes with it, there are fewer reins put on Tim Burton and he injects more of himself into it. Which yields:

Holy shit, this movie is too scary and dark for our target audience of children in order to hock the toys:

Still, the movie's a commercial success, but in order to make it bright and friendly, they hand it over to Joel Schumacher. This is what introduced the Batman campiness.

Also, go back to the era in mind. Modern Batman is largely a product of the Post-Crisis era, a 1985 storyline that collapsed the DC multiverse and rebooted all major heroes. The Batman that was camp was returned to darker roots, reduced to 'urban legend, operates only at night' status in the DCU and the iconic stories like The Dark Knight Returns were produced. Same thing with the Batman Animated Series.

The Batman everyone knew in mainstream was Adam West's Batman (they were still syndicating that everywhere at the time).

The 'serious' Batman didn't have a really big fan-base until the Nolan movies and 20 years of the current iteration of post-crisis 'dark' Batman being part of our society's culture.

 

[Ukomba]

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.

The POINT was that I was talking world wide total. This game of who gets how much is a pointless since no one has hard numbers on how much studios profit from any movie. I just quoted rough statistics, and the fact that some studios have gotten 100% of the revenues for some movies for the first week (A situation I don't believe applies to Ant Man anyways). Also, I don't think there's any information yet on how much money came from each country, the game of what percentage does the studio keep from any given country is even more irrelevant right now.

I mean, if you want to play this game, we can add advertising cost into the mix, or how much money did they get from Baskin Robbins. Shall we include DVD and toy sales into the calculation of a movies success?

Frankly, a movies success is generally determined by their World Wide Gross vs their production budget. Attempting to Parse it out any further than that is masturbatory.

 

[webkilla]

Just saw the movie: Its awesome - not Avengers 1 tier, but Iron man 2 level definetly.

I absolutely loved how they explained why they didn't just call the avengers, and how mixed those very avengers into the plot. It was very well executed.

 

[spartan231490]

Of course it didn't do as well opening weekend, it's ANT-MAN for god's sake. Nobody was frothing at the mouth over ant man. It'll still do pretty good in the long run I bet though. It just didn't get people stomp the door down, cancel everything on opening weekend excited.

 

[medv4380]

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.

You'd give the award of First Female Comic Book Movie to .... Tank Girl 1995?

I'm Socked Socked I Say.

Better to give it to Super Girl, or else you have to sing "Let's Do It"

 

[crimson5pheonix]

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.

You'd give the award of First Female Comic Book Movie to .... Tank Girl 1995?

I'm Socked Socked I Say.

Better to give it to Super Girl, or else you have to sing "Let's Do It"

Oh yes, Tank Girl. What was wrong with Tank Girl? Apart from everything of course...

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

Antman is doing well. Budget £130mill, and has made £113mil in one weekend. I think it will make its money back and i wonder if it will be one of those movies that will sell well later when we see him in Civil War and Avengers 3.

 

[Something Amyss]

I don't know, sounds like this thing's actually doing pretty good for itself.

I don't know how anybody would expect Ant-Man to be a runaway hit - its a deliberately smaller scale film with fixed expectations.

Plus, it's freaking ANT-MAN.

I'm surprised they went with it, since Tony Stark built Ultron in the MCU. In fact, if they could figure out a way to put Wasp in the movies without Pym, I'd not miss him one bit.

But at the same time, I hear the movie's actually pretty good. Word of mouth is still a pretty big deal.

 

[medv4380]

But at the same time, I hear the movie's actually pretty good. Word of mouth is still a pretty big deal.

Speaking of word of mouth this is the only movie that I recall someone seriously flagging me down just to get my opinion on how good, or bad a movie is. I was headed over to one of the other departments at my work to make sure something was understood, and their department head needed to know if it was any good. He's a big comic fan, and he was hoping I saw it opening weekend. My wife had a similar experience with one of her summer school students.

 

[Jaegerbombastic]

My reaction to this in a nutshell


this is a marvel movie, they're going to make the money back. people are just freaked out that it didn't do mine blowing good like guardians of the galaxy

Seriously this is the movie equivalent of first world problems.

Here's your problem: you are thinking about this from the perspective of a normal human being. To a normal human being, opening at number one and making more than $113 million worldwide in the span of 3-4 days is a big success.

Movie execs are not normal human beings. To movie execs, a movie is only a success if the US market nabs a profit during the first weekend. Anything short of that is regarded as a "failure". Just look at all the talk about how Pacific Rim was a box office diappointment despite grossing more than twice its budget. So following movie exec logic, Ant Man is a disappointment because it "only" recouped 87% of its budget in a weekend. This means now there's going to be much hair pulling and doomsaying about how the MCU is in decline and that they should just pump out an endless cycle of Iron Man/Thor/Captain America/Avengers

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

All of that said, it still has to be something of a disappointment for Marvel, especially considering how well the also previously unknown Guardians of the Galaxy wound up doing.

Moral of the story: Antman needed more marketing. Seriously, I could barely walk 2 feet last year without tripping over one Guardians of the Galaxy promo and landing face-first into another one as I fell, and then the guy who helped me up told me about this quirky new movie coming out in a couple weeks I should check out. Then I'd walk a few more feet and the whole thing would happen all over again (maybe I'm just clumsy). Not that I'm complaining, mind, I was completely on board for that movie, and it did not disappoint. My point though is that Antman had very little advertising by comparison.

 

[Queen Michael]

So even though people expected it to make at least 60 million, it only made 58 million? Well, gee golly jeepers! What a disappointment!

Seriously though, this is kinda Dudley Dursley-esque. "Only 36 presents? I expected at least 37!"

 

[Atmos Duality]

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.

And you would be correct.
Very little has actually changed about comic-book based films and their audiences in the past decade.
Rather, I think it's more accurate to say that (some of) the films are getting better at finding their audiences now.

Contextually: Elektra is 11 years old...but so is Batman Begins, which is easily the modern progenitor of DC's (prior) success and precursor to the INSANELY SUCCESSFUL "The Dark Knight" (a major benchmark film for DC and primary contributor to the current popularity of comic book films)

Sadly for DC, they haven't quite realized the same degree of success or popularity since the Dark Knight, mainly because they keep butchering the damn writing.

The other major progenitor is of course Iron Man; which kicked off Marvel's amazing "Avengers Run".
It's already 7 years old so contextually, only 3 years older than Elektra and still firmly in the "modern/current" trend. The difference between the two? Writing. Elektra is a disjointed, boring mess (same with Catwoman).

Robert Downy Jr's performance helped, but I think he gets far too much credit. Iron Man 2 is regarded as a much weaker film than Iron Man 1 despite having all the same "ingredients", sans good writing.

I'll gladly watch Wonder Woman if Wonder Woman is well written and interesting (Gail Simone shows this can be done on paper; quite literally). But if it's just another train wreck of mindbreaking stupidity and overblown action bollocks like Man of Steel, I'm not interested. (oh GOD I hated Man of Steel; and for reasons unrelated to the mythos of Super Man or his character, because I just don't read that many comics)

In any case, I'd like to think that writing matters a fuckton more than whether the lead role has a Y chromosome or not.

 

[Jake Martinez]

I had a feeling it would fall short, I mean lets face it Antman was always going to be a hard sell to the general movie going population

Yeah, I think introducing a solo character like this is a hard sell unless they have a lot of "name recognition" and Ant-Man doesn't have that. I probably would have taken the route they did with the "Guardians of the Galaxy", basically making an ensemble comedy/action piece. Ant-Man + Wasp, then add in some other characters playing "second rung" heroes to the Avengers or something and throw in a SHIELD cameo or RDJR cameo to wrap it up together.

I probably would have gone to see something like that when I couldn't be arsed to go see "Generic Super Hero Action Movie starring version of character I don't like."