EXCLUSIVE: Marvel Studios‘ sequel, The Marvels, has clocked around $6.5M in Thursday night previews we hear from sources. Disney will be reporting their official figure this morning and we’ll update you then. Previews began at 3PM.
The fear out there by many is that this $200M budgeted sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel –which stands as the highest grossing female superhero movie of all-time–could clock the lowest start ever stateside for a Marvel Studios movie; lower than The Incredible Hulk (which was a Universal release before Disney absorbed the MCU) which had a $55.4M start. While tracking took its projections down from $80M to $60M for The Marvels, there is a concern out there that The Marvels could see a $40M+ start.
At $6.5M that’s one of the lower previews we’ve seen in recent times from Marvel, just one notch above Ant-Man ($6.4M, $57.2M) and lower than Disney November misfires The Eternals ($9.5M previews, $71.2M opening) and Thor: Dark World ($7.1M previews, $85.7M).
Advance ticket sales of $5M indicated The Marvels was flying into The Flash‘s territory opening wise. However, The Flash‘s preview figure was higher at $9.7M off showtimes that began at 3PM Thursday.
Critical reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are at 61% fresh, but the RT audience score is higher at 85% — which is promising, however, the die-hards always come out on Thursday night. Thursday night PostTrak exits from ComScore/Screen Engine were severe for general audiences at 3.5 stars, but 4 1/2 stars from parents and 5 stars from kids under 12. That said, kids and parents combined only repped 9% of last night’s audience. The Marvels skewed guys at 63% with men over 25 the biggest turnout at 45% and women over 25 at 24%. That latter demo gave the best recommendation grades of any demo at 61%.
There’s a cacophony of reasons why The Marvels isn’t playing to better levels, one of them being the recently ended actors strike which stifled the pic’s promotion at San Diego and NY Comic-Cons. In the last two days since the strike ended, the pic’s cast is in a whirlwind to show up on late night TV (Brie Larson set to appear on The Tonight Show tonight) and also show up at movie-theaters; Iman Vellani and director Nia DaCosta doing so yesterday at Hollywood’s El Captain.
Larson given the strike’s end can finally scream to the world that The Marvels are here:
Another movie set to crash this weekend is Sony/Affirm’s faith-based musical Journey to Bethlehem which earned $250K last night from previews that began at 2PM from 1,823 locations. The pic is set to arrive in the low single digits.
More….
