Madame Web ‘s Opening Weekend: A Few Thoughts
Over the following four weeks the figure dropped repeatedly to more like $14-$20 million on the day of release — a forty percent fall. Meanwhile the film’s six-day gross between its Valentine’s Day release (February 14) and the conclusion of the four-day President’s Day weekend (February 19) looked as if it would fall short of the bottom end of that initial projection for just the three-day period.
As it happened this was pretty close to the actual course of the debut. Over the Friday-to-Sunday period Madame Web pulled in about $15 million, and $26 million over the whole six day period.
For comparison purposes, Ant-Man 3 made $120 million in just the Friday-to-Monday period on this same weekend back in 2023 — five times as much.
That film, considerably better-received than Madame Web, saw its legs buckle very quickly, the movie grossing 56 percent of its entire take by President’s Day. Especially in light of its even longer opening (six days instead of four) and word-of-mouth being so unlikely to save this one (the Rotten Tomatoes score that was so appallingly low last week has actually fallen further), I do not expect this movie to do much better than that — with the result that (again) I would be very surprised if it got very far past $50 million — much more so than if it fell short of $50 million.*
The story hardly seems following much further than that — but there does seem to me something worth saying about the remarks of the critics, specifically their function of damage control reminiscent of what we saw with Captain Marvel 2. “Yes,” they say, “this movie is a failure, and not simply because of haters and trolls and so forth, but because it is just not a very good movie. And yes, we’ve had a lot of this with superhero movies lately. So those studios had better get their act together and make better superhero movies.”
Pay special attention to that last part: those studios had better get their act together and make better superhero movies. Such remarks have as their function heading off any suggestion that the situation has anything to do with a genre that has been exploited very intensively for a very long time being run down by this point, let alone the model of filmmaking by which Hollywood has lived so long being in crisis — just the studios getting complacent, sloppy, flabby. They just need to get off the couch and diet and get back in shape!
As I have argued again and again, I see abundant reason to think the trouble goes way, way deeper than that. But just as the claqueurs will not tell the public that, the courtiers to the Hollywood elite will not tell their patrons that. The question, then, is whether that elite is intelligent enough not to trust its sycophants.
Alas, “intelligent” and “Hollywood” have not deservedly been spoken in the same sentence very much for a very long time — all as, sadly, the culture of the elite C. Wright Mills described so well favors always speaking “to the well-blunted point” and “soften[ing] the facts into the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view,” rather than facing the facts and thinking hard about how to really deal with them, with results we see all around us every day in this Age of Polycrisis. Hollywood shows no sign of being an exception to that unhappy pattern.
* Last week the critics’ score was 18 percent; now it is 12 percent. Meanwhile the audience score is 56 percent. By comparison Ant-Man 3’s less than brilliant scores were 46 and 82 percent, respectively.
Originally published at https://raritania.blogspot.com.
