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

[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.

 

[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...