Weekend projections: The Marvels crashing to worst MCU opening

November 12, 2023

The Marvels

There’s simply no way to sugarcoat this one. The Marvels is having a disastrous opening weekend, limping to a projected $47 million as of Sunday morning. That’s the worst opening weekend for any movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, behind The Incredible Hulk’s $55.4 million back in 2008. International numbers are looking a little better, with $63.3 million projected from 51 territories, but that points to a likely global total of $300 million to $400 million—in the vicinity of the pandemic-ravaged Eternals and Black Widow.

Here’s how the domestic numbers look as of Sunday morning (click on the image for the full chart of films reporting so far)…



Disney had already seen the writing on the wall when they re-dated pretty much every film in their Marvel slate last week. The next MCU release, Captain America: Brave New World is now scheduled for February 14, 2025—well over a year from now. That leaves time not just for reshoots, but for rewrites and recasting of key characters, and one has to assume that the Marvel creative team will be working through the holidays to figure out where they go from here.

The one glimmer of light is that The Marvels will marginally beat our Friday-morning prediction, meaning that it’s getting decent word of mouth. Disney reports an 85% Verified Audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and PostTrak scores of 3.5 stars from the general audience, 4.5 stars from parents and 4 stars from kids. The film does have the opportunity to put in a decent run if it can hold on through Thanksgiving, but it’ll have a big battle to avoid being completely overshadowed by The Hunger Games next weekend.

In my Friday column, I introduced our new model for predicting the weekend box office based on our baseline model and Thursday’s preview numbers. That worked very well for The Marvels, and somewhat worse for Journey to Bethlehem, which is coming in about $1 million behind our prediction with a projected $2.425-million opening. That is, however, a significant improvement over our old model, which would have predicted $5.4 million. The film’s performance is a disappointment, but Sony will hope it’ll have strong legs going into the holidays. Perhaps it would have fared better if it had been released closer to Christmas?

A couple of films showing good legs this weekend are Priscilla and The Holdovers. There’s a real dearth of quality drama at the moment, largely due to the actors strike, I believe, and those two movies are taking advantage of the lack of competition. Perhaps, with the strike over, we’ll see a few more Oscar hopefuls added to the release schedule in the next few weeks.

- Studio weekend projections
- All-time top-grossing movies in North America
- All-time top-grossing movies worldwide

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Bruce Nash,

Filed under: Marvel Cinematic Universe