2023 is off to an inauspicious start for the superhero genre. Director Peyton Reed’s latest Marvel sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and director David F. Sandberg’s DC Studios sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods are the first two big superhero releases of the year, but both films seem to have forgotten why audiences loved them in the first place.
Official Dolby Cinema poster for “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has about $470 million in the bank, but will struggle to limp across the $500 million finish line. More likely is an outcome in the $485+/- million range, a comedown of $35-40 million from the previous franchise installment five years ago.
As the kickoff to Marvel Studio’s Phase Five, this is especially painful. And in the aftermath of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever combining for $4.47 billion in two years — demonstrating that the perpetual Covid pandemic, major storms, and other factors have ceased to significantly impact the MCU’s performance at the box office — it’s even more troubling.
Likewise, Shazam! Fury of the Gods is on pace for a shockingly low sub-$150 million global cume by the end of its run. As part of DC Studio’s final slate of films to bring the current DCEU to close and to transition into a new rebooted DCU under the leadership of co-CEOs James Gunn and David Safran, Fury of the Gods needed to perform at least as well as the first Shazam! back in 2019.
This year looked like a banger for DC, with the upcoming The Flash, Blue Beetle, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom generating buzz and excitement around the potential for DC cinema to finally match Marvel’s box office success while the MCU has an unexpected whiff with Quantumania. DC needed to come out the gate swinging, and instead both studios have a bit of egg on their faces, but the majority of it landed on DC.
This is a fate nobody expected, and certainly not one either film or franchise deserve. These sequels and their predecessor films are good and in some cases great. While audiences didn’t flock to them like an Avengers movie, they still enjoyed high audience grades and healthy box office returns on their relatively modest budgets.
So what went wrong this time? The single biggest issue both films have is failure to deliver what their built-in audiences most expected and wanted from another sequel. Interestingly, though, the answer to what those audiences expected and wanted is somewhat the reverse for each of the two franchises.
For Ant-Man and the Wasp, I believe the most enthusiastic and loyal audience for the franchise favored the more personal stakes and contained scale of the stories, which put focus squarely on the characters’ interactions and relationships while using their powers and the spectacle sequences to highlight those personalities and relationships.
The new film Quantumania, however, sought to up the stakes by moving the characters out of their usual settings and themes and contexts, and into a larger fantastical world with major stakes and action scenes reflective of other bigger Marvel franchises. Ant-Man and Wasp as characters were entirely out of their element, facing villains far more powerful than anything they should normally be able to survive, let alone defeat or fight to a draw. So in this way, then, the latest film foregoes much of the environment, depiction, and framework fans of the series came to know and love.
Conversely, those who didn’t prefer the Ant-Man and the Wasp series due to its restrained approach and familial focus might have initially been drawn to the larger stakes of Quantumania and expect something more akin to one of the bigger team-ups or franchises, yet encountered many of those elements transposed upon this series’ character arcs and relationships, and with a climax and outcome bringing everything back into the traditional Ant-Man and Wasp themes and style. For them, then, this film didn’t go far enough toward the bigger overarching Marvel spectacle.
Meaning the film lacked enough of what made it popular before, and/or enough of what would’ve transcended the previous approach for a larger blockbuster approach. Both sets of potential audiences felt they only got part of what they expected and wanted, and so they left dissatisfied.
I personally felt the film found a good balance between its past and its future, and I mostly enjoyed the heck out of it. That said, I can understand why other fans felt it either lacked enough of what they loved from the previous movies, or enough change to win them over if they didn’t love what came before.
If I had to guess, I’d say another MCU superhero being along for the ride (probably for the subplot involving Ant-Man and his daughter) could’ve helped, as would spending more time in the previously established world for the characters (especially more fun with how semi-fame has changed their lives, and maybe showing Ant-Man and Wasp in action against some other criminals/villains around town) before they get pulled into the Quantum Realm, setting up a victory at the end which is achieved involving something relevant from their earlier scenes in the normal world.
My p0int is, a few tweaks to incorporate larger MCU elements and characters crossing over to give Quantumania an even larger sense of transitioning into a bigger MCU franchise, yet still firmly grounded in the traditional world of these heroes as a base from which their new adventures arise, might have helped make both sets of audiences/fans happier and translated into enough extra interest to boost the film beyond $500 million or $600 million.
Of course, with the biggest budget yet of the Ant-Man and Wasp series, Quantumania would’ve had to go even more expensive to get additional Marvel heroes into the mixture, which is an added complication since that means the box office results need to be even larger to break even or turn a profit. And hindsight is 20/20 of course. If I’d seen the film prior to its release, I’d personally have expected it to easily top the gross of 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, even as I also worried a bit about the elements that could wind up disappointing various sets of fans.
For Shazam: Fury of the Gods, the situation seems to be different. Again, we have a smaller scale franchise with more personal stakes and familial sensibilities, but this time the sequel toned down the humor and certain other elements of the family framework and children’s-eye-view of the world that made 2019’s Shazam! so beloved by its fans. The sequel also foregoes using comic book villains in favor of creating original villains and a complex plot involving lots of new mythology to explain to the audience.
The result, while still entertaining and good, honestly doesn’t have the same lightening-in-a-bottle charm and magic of the first film, while incorporating more spectacle and action in place of much of what helped the original movie stand out. It tried to remain superficially the same while also trying to expand within still-limited constraints of its budget and world. That it’s also navigating its place in the DCEU and future DCU doesn’t help.
Indeed, the biggest problems with Fury of the Gods arise from the now publicly aired drama behind the scenes. Put simply, there’s zero excuse for Black Adam’s absence from the first Shazam! and Fury of the Gods, nor is there an acceptable excuse for Shazam’s absence from Black Adam. Superman and Wonder Woman fit well into this universe of characters, too, but alas all of these films were hamstrung by bad choices and grudges that prevented the glaringly obvious best choices from being playing out.
We should’ve gotten Superman and Black Adam cameoing in Shazam!; Superman and Shazam appearing in Black Adam; and Black Adam, Wonder Woman, and Superman showing up in a big crossover event for Fury of the Gods. And if we had gotten those things, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation about Shazam! Fury of the Gods flopping. We’d probably see these characters returning in the new DCU. It might’ve even gotten Henry Cavill one more Superman movie to cap his era.
Regardless of what might’ve been for either film, the reality is the year in superhero cinema has suffered a significant one-two combination of setbacks sure to spark lots of think pieces claiming “superhero fatigue” or some other nefarious cause, instead of simply looking at both films and recognizing where they failed to live up to audience expectations and wants.
So when worrying whether this bodes ill for the rest of Marvel’s and DC’s upcoming slates, remember how many times in the past we’ve been treated to round after round of “the sky is falling” narratives about “superhero fatigue” whenever a film or two fail to meet expectations, and how it’s never actually a consistent trend.
On the other hand, this is a big red flag for studios and a sign that these franchises need to take care to learn what their respective audiences love and desire most from the films, and find ways to deliver that in ways both consistent with what’s expected yet also capable of surprising and bringing new, unique elements to the table.
Since hindsight provides that aforementioned 20/20 perspective, this is yet another example of lessons to be learned and applied — something some studios have proven far better at than others, and which can either sink or save a franchise and its superhero plans.
Be sure to check back here again soon, dear readers, for more of my updates, news, and analysis about movies and box office.
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