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https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2017/11/24/justice-league-disappointing-holiday-box-office-makes-any-fantastic-beasts-comparisons-moot/#5727c87848f5
NOV 24, 2017 @ 03:15 PM
61,392
'Justice League' Disappointing Holiday Box Office Makes Any 'Fantastic Beasts' Comparisons Moot
Mark Hughes , CONTRIBUTOR
I write about films, especially superhero films, & Hollywood.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
The Thanksgiving holiday weekend is underway in earnest, and several films are vying for better positions at the box office as audiences choose between a slate of offerings with lots of family appeal. Holdovers Justice League, Thor: Ragnarok, and Wonder had to make way for Disney-Pixar's new animated release Coco as it continues to play higher than anticipated, at the expense of any second-place challenger. Which means Justice League's hopes for an upset victory or even a photo finish appear to be quickly vanishing, with Coco now on pace to take $75+ million and Justice League's totals being continuously revised downward, currently around $61+/- million.
While that's still a fine result for the weekend and represents an acceptable 53% decline from its opening weekend, there's a larger and more disturbing trend taking place through the holiday week and weekend that bode ill for Justice League's longterm prospects. And make no mistake, the distance between Coco and Justice League in five-day and three-day comparisons is not really very close if these numbers hold up, representing quite a different outcome than the toe-to-toe battle for first place many were predicting heading into the holiday.
Before I get started breaking down the numbers, a quick but important note is unfortunately necessary first. It's absurd to even have to remind you that I liked Justice League, gave it a good review, encouraged fans and mainstream audiences to not only see it but to also bring friends and family to see it too. I'm not an evil puppet trying to ruin things fans like, I'm not a secret paid ninja working for Disney (a common but ridiculous and childish conspiracy theory perpetuated by fans who accuse anyone saying bad things of being a spy), and I'm not discussing financial information and facts at a business news outlet for any other reason than the fact it's literally what we do here and a normal, honest thing that I'd be saying about any major blockbuster suffering this same situation while a large group of fans argue and deny what's happening.
I can like a movie and be hopeful as a fan that it does well, and I can hope fandom stops arguing and spreading negative behavior and tone amongst themselves or stop attacking media and other fans who have differing opinions, but when I sit down to do my job here, I have to look at the truth and the facts and then talk about them as best I can. The hope is that it explains what's going on, overcomes myths and falsehoods perpetuated on social media, by fans, and by some folks who feed on fans' hopes and wishes just to promote themselves or their claims. At this point, having a serious discussion about not only Justice League but also the DCEU, what might happen, and what maybe should happen requires being frank and realistic about the whole situation. As not just a writer but a fan and someone who loves cinema, I want -- and feel I must -- talk about all of these things openly and try to overcome blind spots or misleading perceptions that get in the way of useful, worthwhile discussion and understanding.
So enough of the qualifiers, then, because the math says what it says. Let's be very blunt and honest about what's happening: Justice League has the lowest domestic opening weekend of the entire DCEU, and the lowest domestic opening weekend of any live-action superhero movie in 2017 except Logan -- which, by the way, only fell $5 million shy of Justice League's domestic opening. Justice League also had the lowest domestic first Monday of the entire DCEU, and the lowest domestic first Monday of any live-action superhero film this year except Logan, which it only beat by a couple of million bucks.
Many fans trumpeted the film's domestic 41% rise on Tuesday, but that's a highly misleading and pointless argument for a few key reasons. First of all, 41% sounds like a big number, except the literal dollar amount was just $3 million, so let's not ignore the context in favor of big-sounding percentages that belie what's going on. Second, the reason for that jump on Tuesday is simply that North American schools began dismissing children for the Thanksgiving holiday starting Tuesday, and then each subsequent day of the week had a larger percentage of schools dismissing for the holiday as well. Notice, though, that the daily box office for the movie didn't continue to climb.
And that's where the story for Justice League is now really starting to become clear. You've probably heard some YouTubers and fans pointing to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them as a hopeful example of how Justice League is actually performing well -- so this story goes, anyway -- and has a chance to top $800 million worldwide. Beware false hopes, though, because the comparison was already deeply flawed to begin with, and now this weekend has shattered that wishful thinking.
Fantastic Beasts got an A grade from audiences, enjoyed overwhelmingly positive reviews, followed the wildly successful and beloved decade-plus Harry Potter franchise, and played against a Marvel movie (Doctor Strange) with less powerful legs than Justice League's competitor (Thor: Ragnarok) and a Disney film (Moana) that likewise didn't have quite the same marathon-run potential as this weekend's new Disney-Pixar release (Coco). Compare that to Justice League's B+ audience score, bad reviews, and following a DCEU that had a decidedly mixed reaction from audiences and critics, as well the aforementioned tougher competition at the box office. Right off the bat, then, you should be able to tell that any serious comparison between the two is hard to make.
Now look closer and notice that Fantastic Beasts, with all of those advantages, finished with an $814 million total at the global box office. That cume is significantly lower than Justice League realistically needs to make in order to avoid being yet another underperformer for the DCEU. It's lower than Wonder Woman and Batman v Superman, despite being the DCEU's big team-up movie that everything was building towards, despite the intention to launch other solo spinoff movies for Flash, Cyborg, and of course Aquaman (whose own solo outing is already finished and releases in 2018).
With roughly $750 million worldwide being the "break even" point for Justice League, a run equal to Fantastic Beasts would still only result in $64 million supposed "profit," which must then be split in half since theaters keep around 40-50% of global ticket sales. The remaining $32 million would then have to take out any backend point for the film's stars and filmmakers who had contracts guaranteeing a percentage of the box office. Let's be generous and take just $5 million for that backend column on the spreadsheet, leaving $27 million to be divided up among the film's investors and distributors. Remember the opening of the film, when you saw all of those various company logos? Yeah, they all get a slice of the dwindling $27 million pie.
If you think that's the sort of results major studios and investors find acceptable after spending years developing a project, waiting more than a year for it to be completed and released, and investing hundreds of millions of dollars to make it happen, then you need to think again.
But notice, we didn't adjust the Fantastic Beasts box office for a more honest and realistic expectation of where Justice League would wind up due to its A audience grade, bad reviews, and harder competition. Even if all of that resulted in just a 5% comedown from Fantastic Beasts' $814 million global performance, we are talking about a final cume in the range of $733 million worldwide. Now look back up at the previous paragraph's discussion of the "break even" point and profit margins, and tell me if anything jumps out at you. Remember, all I did was reduce the box office cume by 5% to account for worse reviews, an audience score two positions lower, and stronger competition at the box office.
You might still insist the folks predicting a potential Fantastic Beasts level performance are still correct, and that even a small profit is still a profit and thus mitigates how bad things turn out for Justice League. However, if the previous facts about difference between the films and the implications of such box office numbers didn't convince you of the more likely reality for the final outcome, then the next set of numbers will. Because despite continued insistence that Justice League is performing ahead of Fantastic Beasts, that entire premise came crashing down this week and weekend.
The opening domestic weekend indeed gave Justice League a big head start on Fantastic Beasts, but look at the subsequent domestic weekday totals, and you'll see that from Monday through Thursday, Justice League's cume for the four weekdays is just about $500,000 ahead of Fantastic Beasts for the same first weekday stretch. Then, over the second weekend, Justice League is on track to take $42-43 million, or a few million less than Fantastic Beasts' own second weekend. So Justice League's supposed pacing ahead of Fantastic Beasts will -- if things continue to proceed the way they have been this week and over the start of the holiday -- rest solely on its opening weekend, and it will lose ground until eventually the dollar advantage could wind up erased.
Obviously things could pick up again next week, and maybe it'll have a stronger hold on its third weekend, but at some point we need to stop saying "wait and see" and stop ignoring the math.
Yes, it's always technically possible that anything could happen in the future -- an asteroid could slam into Earth and make this all a moot point, or millions of fans could wake up today determined to rush to theaters en mass and buy up multiple tickets to push Justice League's box office higher just because they want to help the DCEU or just to try to prove the critics and box office pundits wrong. But more likely is that things turn out generally as expected, and that we are left having to admit Justice League isn't performing very well compared to how it needed to play.
What that means for the future, it's still too early to know. And of course, the foreign box office could wind up higher than expected, with stronger holds than expected. If Justice League can hold at 50% drops every week for the rest of its entire run, and if it remains in theaters for another two months, and if international receipts account for 70% of its worldwide cume instead of just 60-66%, then it's technically possible for the film to finish near $850 million. In other words, if everything stops going wrong and instead starts going as well as possible from now on, then the best-case scenario could get it to $850 million.
But that isn't going to happen, and there's little evidence to give anyone reason to expect it or hold out hope for it. The more realistic decent-case scenario (meaning an average run from here on out) would put Justice League at around $730+/- million, and it's entirely reasonable to feel such a number is possible and likely. However, I fear the truth is that the most likely moderate-case situation is a finish in the $700 million range, and a bad-but-not-worse-case in the $650 million range.
Those figures might seem outrageously low, and indeed they are, relative to the film we're talking about and where it needed and should've played financially; but they are based on more typical weekly declines for similar films as more competition comes out, based on the audience score and reviews. The true worst-case scenario, if you really want to know how bad it could be if the film begins to have steep drops for a couple of weeks and then plummets as Star Wars: The Last Jedi hits theaters, would be about $600-610 million, and make no mistake -- while being a worst-case, those figures are entirely within the realm of reasonable predictions based on the way things have turned out so far and compared to some past worst-case situations for certain DCEU releases.
Warner Bros. knew already that Justice League had problems, which is why it got new footage and reshoots this summer, and it's why they went into the opening nervous and largely hoping to mitigate the pain while hoping perhaps things could wind up better than expected. But they knew there was a danger -- indeed, a likelihood -- of underperformance, and while it looks likely to result in a loss, they knew this was possible.
The numbers are coming in worse than feared, and it seems obvious changes will now have to be made at the studio and with the plans going forward, but there's not going to be a stoppage of DC projects and the DCEU itself won't even be cancelled entirely at this point. Remember, Aquaman releases next year, and we'll get Wonder Woman sequels because the first film was too successful to ignore. Shazam! will probably happen too, and Batman is getting a solo series of films one way or another in the next few years. It's also likely that at least one or two other projects -- be it a Suicide Squad sequel, the Harley Quinn-Joker spinoff, or one of the "elseworld" banner projects -- will continue forward in the next several months and years. Yes, DC movies will keep right on coming, don't worry.
It's the context that's questionable, but even there, consider that despite my concern and my previous writeup about the danger to the DCEU's survival after the next few years, it's also possible that the studio and execs and board of directors will consider Justice League's failure the final unfortunate chapter from the initial planning stages of the DCEU, and that they already have a new set of superior plans and leadership in place to largely ignore the outcome for Justice League and focus on the upcoming projects without much change.
After all, Wonder Woman was really an example of the new approach and planning for the DCEU, even though its release puts it a bit out of order due to Justice League's extended development and production scheduling. If the two films could hypothetically swap places on the release calendar without changing their box office results, consider how it would look now -- Justice League represents the closing chapter of the first phase of the DCEU, and Wonder Woman launches the new phase with an entirely new plan and approach and leadership. In that scenario, things look much better for the future, yes? Well conceptually, that's sort of the reality of the situation right now, with regard to the general way the business plan for the DCEU is positioned. Aquaman likewise represents the new approach going forward, so its quality and success would in theory be another sign of having left behind the first rocky stages and getting much better footing.
The big question is, can a major studio business take a big enough step back and conceive of this nonlinear conceptualization of the DCEU model? Or is the ultimate reality that despite Wonder Woman's big success, Justice League will wind up too big of a letdown to ignore, with one standout home run being insufficient to convince a board of directors and major investors to keep everything and everyone in place while investing hundreds of millions more dollars to stay the course with some of their most valuable but now-tainted IPs?
Those international box office numbers will provide better evidence for us to predict which way things are going to land, but remember the studio receives a vastly smaller percentage of foreign ticket sales -- from 30% to 40%, being generous about it, depending on the particular market -- and so while it will boost the worldwide figures it doesn't move the needle anywhere near as much as domestic box office does. And also keep in mind that when the films keep underperforming, it depresses merchandising potential as well, and so the fact Justice League comes after Wonder Woman instead of beforehand could mean those excellent merchandising sales for the Amazon princess-warrior see a negative effect from Justice League, too.
I'll have more to say in the coming days and weeks, including an assessment of various ways I think the DCEU could best move forward. For now, however, we're left with another disappointing weekend when we really dig down into the numbers, and we must await more days and more numbers to tell what comes next ------------------------------------------
America from 9:00 on: https://youtu.be/GUwLCQU10KQ
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