‘Eternals’ Seeing Possible $70M+ Opening Weekend: Why This Is A Wake-Up Call For The MCU; ‘Red Notice’ Box Office Unreported
Saturday AM Update: Disney/Marvel’s Eternals, as of this minute, is still looking to come in at $70M+ for the weekend. But the feature could buckle and land in the high $60M range if it doesn’t have a solid Saturday night. For a glossy superstar ensemble with Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden, Kit Harington, Salma Hayek, and Gemma Chan about superhero gods, it’s not the type of opening we’d come to expect from the MCU.
Disney has confidence that the pic will deliver between $70M-$75M. Friday is right where we saw it yesterday with $30.7M. True, among Disney-released Marvel titles, Ant-Man ranks as the lowest, with a $57.2M opening, and it’s possible that Eternals is $5M shy of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings‘ $75M 3-day. However, the latter was boosted by a 4-day holiday weekend.
Marvel
Now, before some sector of the Wall Street media writes about cinema’s obituary, or tries to blame Covid-19, let’s provide a wake-up call here: It’s not a shocker to see the numbers so low on Eternals, and it boils down to the film itself, not the current state of moviegoing.
And you can’t blame Disney in any way shape or form for not selling Eternals, as its marketing machine was in great shape. Disney has secured $100M in global marketing support from bespoke brands, higher than that of Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and also pre-pandemic MCU titles like 2017’s Guardians of the Galaxy 2‘s which brought in $80M worth of advertiser support. The biggest brand blitz ever racked up by a Marvel movie belongs to Sony’s Spider-Man: Far From Home which touted $288M in 2019 media value.
Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao delivered a very byzantine, confusing movie with ten protagonists that’s part of the deeper-universe Marvel IP (which is always a box office gamble.
But Marvel has typically bucked such risks in the past) that, in addition to being one of the longer origin stories, is the worst-reviewed MCU movie of all-time at 48% on Rotten Tomatoes, and most panned by moviegoers in the Disney MCU with a B CinemaScore and lackluster Comscore/Screen Engine PostTrak exits of 77% and 3 1/2 stars (and, yes, for those being technical, Universal’s 2003 title Hulk, which was executive produced by Kevin Feige, is the worst-received Marvel movie ever with a B-). Personally, after seeing Eternals, I couldn’t even tell you what it’s about; they lure you in thinking one of the characters is a villain, and then they’re not, and at the end of the day, the payoff isn’t as seamless as learning who was Keyser Soze at the end of The Usual Suspects.
Between reviews and audience exits, these are not the type of results we are used to from Marvel, which typically yields platinum in both areas. From what we know about their sausage-making machine of test screenings with previous MCU filmmakers, and the Feige touch, there’s usually safeguards in place to prevent such complications from ensuing. It’s not clear what went sideways here. The MCU has a great reputation for catapulting indie filmmakers with a unique voice, (i.e. Taikia Waititi, Jon Watts, etc.) and harnessing them to display their visions within the parameters of the comic book environment. While Marvel, of course, had told ensemble stories before with the Avengers franchise and Captain America: Civil War, quite often many of the characters were already set-up in previous standalone films.
Saturday AM Update: Disney/Marvel’s Eternals, as of this minute, is still looking to come in at $70M+ for the weekend. But the feature could buckle and land in the high $60M range if it doesn’t have a solid Saturday night. For a glossy superstar ensemble with Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden, Kit Harington, Salma Hayek, and Gemma Chan about superhero gods, it’s not the type of opening we’d come to expect from the MCU.
Disney has confidence that the pic will deliver between $70M-$75M. Friday is right where we saw it yesterday with $30.7M. True, among Disney-released Marvel titles, Ant-Man ranks as the lowest, with a $57.2M opening, and it’s possible that Eternals is $5M shy of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings‘ $75M 3-day. However, the latter was boosted by a 4-day holiday weekend.
Marvel
Now, before some sector of the Wall Street media writes about cinema’s obituary, or tries to blame Covid-19, let’s provide a wake-up call here: It’s not a shocker to see the numbers so low on Eternals, and it boils down to the film itself, not the current state of moviegoing.
And you can’t blame Disney in any way shape or form for not selling Eternals, as its marketing machine was in great shape. Disney has secured $100M in global marketing support from bespoke brands, higher than that of Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and also pre-pandemic MCU titles like 2017’s Guardians of the Galaxy 2‘s which brought in $80M worth of advertiser support. The biggest brand blitz ever racked up by a Marvel movie belongs to Sony’s Spider-Man: Far From Home which touted $288M in 2019 media value.
Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao delivered a very byzantine, confusing movie with ten protagonists that’s part of the deeper-universe Marvel IP (which is always a box office gamble.
But Marvel has typically bucked such risks in the past) that, in addition to being one of the longer origin stories, is the worst-reviewed MCU movie of all-time at 48% on Rotten Tomatoes, and most panned by moviegoers in the Disney MCU with a B CinemaScore and lackluster Comscore/Screen Engine PostTrak exits of 77% and 3 1/2 stars (and, yes, for those being technical, Universal’s 2003 title Hulk, which was executive produced by Kevin Feige, is the worst-received Marvel movie ever with a B-). Personally, after seeing Eternals, I couldn’t even tell you what it’s about; they lure you in thinking one of the characters is a villain, and then they’re not, and at the end of the day, the payoff isn’t as seamless as learning who was Keyser Soze at the end of The Usual Suspects.
Between reviews and audience exits, these are not the type of results we are used to from Marvel, which typically yields platinum in both areas. From what we know about their sausage-making machine of test screenings with previous MCU filmmakers, and the Feige touch, there’s usually safeguards in place to prevent such complications from ensuing. It’s not clear what went sideways here. The MCU has a great reputation for catapulting indie filmmakers with a unique voice, (i.e. Taikia Waititi, Jon Watts, etc.) and harnessing them to display their visions within the parameters of the comic book environment. While Marvel, of course, had told ensemble stories before with the Avengers franchise and Captain America: Civil War, quite often many of the characters were already set-up in previous standalone films.
