Wonder Woman 1984 can blame only itself for its death at the international box office, not the coronavirus.
This fact is so obvious, even suck-up trade publications like Variety are forced to admit it:
[T]he weekend’s domestic grosses do represent a steep decline, signaling waning interest from fans… The superhero sequel … is currently suffering some social media backlash for not rising to the level of its beloved predecessor[.]
Domestically, in its second weekend, Wonder Woman 1984 took a 67 percent dive. Over the Christmas weekend, this piece of garbage grossed $16.7 million. Over New Year’s weekend it grossed just $5.5 million, which should not have happened. You always expect a second weekend drop, but when you are moving from one holiday weekend to another holiday weekend, most especially a three-day holiday weekend, you’re talking backlash by way of terrible word-of-mouth.
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Because Americans should not trust movie reviewers, most especially the brown-nosers who are given early access to studio films, Wonder Woman 1984 at first enjoyed a Rotten Tomato rating in the high eighties. Oh, how the liars gushed and gushed and gushed. Well, now that everyone has gotten a chance to see it, the Rotten Tomato rating is hanging on to a “fresh” rating by only one point at 60 percent.
But even when Wonder Woman 1984 was in high-eighties, if you read the reviews, you could tell the movie was going to be bad, you could tell the reviewers didn’t actually like the movie but still gave it a positive rating for affirmative action purposes involving female writer-director Patty Jenkins.
Overseas, the news is even worse. Wonder Woman 1984 has grossed just $90 million, and is already near dead in China, where movie-going is pretty much back to normal. Over the summer and during this same pandemic, Tenet ended up grossing $66 million in China. Wonder Woman 1984 will be lucky to hit $30 million. For more context, since November 26, Croods 2 has already grossed $50 million in China.
Overall overseas, Tenet grossed $305 million. Wonder Woman 1984 will be lucky to do half that.
Domestically, Tenet grossed $58 million here in North America. Wonder Woman 1984 will probably collapse at right around $40 million.
Did the China Virus and all these pointless lockdowns hurt Wonder Woman 1984? Of course. It also hurt Tenet. But even if you factor all that in, Wonder Woman 1984 is still a box office catastrophe, a movie so awful that the goodwill generated by the original was not enough to save it.
In the end, the only good news for Warner Bros. is that the studio made the exact right decision to premier Wonder Woman 1984 on its streaming HBO Max service on the same day it hit theaters. The movie is not going to even begin to recoup its reported $200 million budget, so using it as a loss leader, as a commercial of sorts for its fledgling streaming service, did at least add some actual value to this box office catastrophe.
A third Wonder Woman has already been greenlit but that’s years away, after Jenkins further destroys the Star Wars film franchise. Who knows what the streaming-theatrical world will look like in 2025. Wonder Woman 3 could very well end up being a ten-part streaming series — another loss leader to increase subscriptions to a streaming service.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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