It’s been five years since Aquaman last graced movie theater screens, thrashing expectations of what kind of business a movie about damp people could do without being made by James Cameron.
With that dynamite success in our minds, one question lingers: Can Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom be as financially successful as its predecessor?
The curt but straightforward answer: probably not. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is unlikely to make more at the box office than Aquaman did, but then again, neither will most movies (more on that in a moment). At present, Variety estimates that the sequel might ⏤ might ⏤ clear $40 million over its four-day opening weekend, putting box office projections somewhere below The Marvels but above CATS. There are many reasons why this may be the case, so let’s peruse a few right meow.
Why must Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom fail, papa?
Consider all of the factors that made Aquaman a success story back in 2018. The long-suffering DCEU was still shaking off the jitters from the cinematic rat king that was Justice League. While the loudest corner of the internet screamed into each other’s open mouths about how the Snyder Cut would save us all, quieter folks were eager to see Jason Momoa focused in with a more singular lens. Early reviews for Aquaman, which was marketed as a fresh beginning for the franchise, sold fans on what was allegedly the most Marvel-y DC movie to date.
And here we are, just five years later, looking back at the high-water mark ⏤ the place where Warner Bros. made waves, then rolled back. Jason Momoa is still charming, but audiences aren’t tripping over themselves to see him chuckle hairily anymore ⏤ at least not the way that Universal was probably hoping they would when they added him as the high-profile star of Fast X only for the movie to pull in a little over half of what The Fate of the Furious made six years earlier. What’s more, being “so much more like a Marvel movie” isn’t the compliment that it used to be. These days, it mostly just means that a flick doesn’t have enough Robert Downey Jr. to be fun.
Aquaman 2 and the ever-lurking threat of franchise death
Most importantly, where 2018’s Aquaman was designed to be a fresh start for a franchise with infinite potential, Aquaman 2 is the opposite: an undesigned end. It’s the last entry in the DCEU era of blockbusters, not thanks to careful planning and a tapestry of storytelling, but because everything almost always went wrong. The shared universe that started with 2013’s Man of Steel was a gordian knot of aesthetics, tones, and character interpretations. If the MCU leading up to Endgame was a Rube Goldberg device, carefully designed to lead from A to B to C ⏤ or, at least, to look like that’s what it was doing ⏤ then the DCEU was a Pachinko machine: countless indistinguishable balls of story bouncing off each other, consequence-free, before disappearing into the pit at the back of the audience’s memory.
When the credits roll on Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, the machine gets unceremoniously unplugged. No fanfare, no lead-in to the next chapter of the story, just narrative entropy. For all of our collective complaints about the endless treadmill of comic book movies, it’s hard to get audiences excited by promising them nothing.
All of this ignores a monumentally important detail: That it would be bananas if Lost Kingdom beat Aquaman’s box office take. It would be wild if any DC movie did, or if most unrelated movies did, for that matter. In a post-pandemic world, where crowded rooms are still uncomfortable and tentpole movies are almost guaranteed to hit the streaming services that you’re already paying for within a month or two, the money that Aquaman made is borderline unheard of. It was the DCEU’s highest-grossing picture across its 10-year history. On a $160 million budget, it became the first film in the franchise to cross the $1 billion mark. The Flash did a quarter of what Aquaman did, numbers-wise. Black Adam did about a third.
The unfortunate prognosis of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
Without the fervor of Zack Snyder’s fandom, or even the postmodern irony that turned the Morbius re-release into what might have been the first case of an entire film studio being cyberbullied, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom doesn’t have a base to play to. Without the promise that it’s building to something new, it scans as a narrative dead end. It’s been pointed out by smarter people that superhero movies don’t feel special anymore and it’s difficult to think of a better example of that phenomenon than this: The vestigial mass of story hanging off of a dead franchise, desperately hoping that crowds will show up for the angry-eyed swimmy guy from half a decade ago putting on a rubber skin suit that’s a different color than last time.
But if it helps, Jason Momoa might be Lobo now. So at least that’s something we can all look forward to.
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