Why 2023 was a tough year for superhero movies, and what to look forward to in 2024

 Why 2023 was a tough year for superhero movies, and what to look forward to in 2024

DC and Marvel have had a string of box office struggles over the course of the year

Paul Rudd as Ant-Man and Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror in Marvel's Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Photo: Disney

In 1985, Tina Turner sang that “we don’t need another hero” on the soundtrack to the third instalment of cult dystopian sci-fi Mad Max. Four decades on, cinema audiences may be coming around to her point of view.

There’s been much talk of “superhero fatigue” over the course of 2023 as successive projects from both major players in the genre, Marvel and DC, limped from one unimpressive box office haul to another.

In the Disney-owned Marvel camp in March, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania banked, in Marvel terms, a mere $476.1 million globally. While the sum may read as impressive, with a $200 million production budget, and marketing budgets often equalling production costs for flagpole releases, it would have been lucky to scrape into profit.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is harder to quantify. It’s animated and non-MCU-canon – part of the affiliated Sony Spider-Man Universe. Its $683 million June release is no small change, but it’s only around a third of the near-$2 billion banked in December 2021 by Spider-Man: No Way Home, the last live-action Spider-Man outing.

It’s not been an entirely disastrous year for Marvel. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, a relatively niche Marvel property, achieved a solid $845 million haul in May.

Zoe Saldana and Chris Pratt star in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, which was a superhero success story this year. AP

But then we come to last month’s opening for The Marvels. Its $46 million domestic launch weekend was the worst in the history of the MCU and it has since gone on to take $199 million globally. The direction of travel seems indisputable.

Things have been no better over at arch-rival DC. The Flash pulled in $270.6 million worldwide in June, but with a production budget of around $220 million the film is tipped to be one of the biggest box office flops of all time, losing parent company Warner Bros around $200 million. August’s Blue Beetle made just $129 million globally, while in March Shazam! Fury of the Gods made $133.8 million.

What has happened to all the heroes?

There was a time, in the 2010s, when the genre appeared to be a money-printing machine for studios.

Avengers: Endgame is the most obvious example, displacing Avatar as the highest-grossing film to date, with a $2.8 billion haul in 2019. But it’s no isolated example. Revenue tracker Box Office Mojo’s all-time list of top-grossing films features no fewer than four MCU entries in the top 10.

Even less well-known Marvel characters such as Captain Marvel and Iron Man – who was very much a fringe member of the team before his cinematic renaissance – have all surpassed $1 billion at the box office.

At DC, historically the runner up in the Marvel vs DC big-screen battle, Aquaman, Joker and the last two films in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy also find themselves in the billion-dollar-club.

Joaquin Phoenix in Joker, the 2019 film that surpassed $1 billion in box office revenue. Photo: Warner Bros Pictures

It’s a club both studios would have dearly loved to join in 2023, a year when the undisputed movie event of the year was the summer box office showdown between a three-hour historical epic about the invention of the atom bomb and a surreal feminist comedy from an acclaimed indie director about a doll launched in the 1950s. It’s hard to think of two films further removed from the superhero genre.

The Hollywood strikes have played their part in hampering both release schedules and publicity over the course of the year, but both Barbie and Oppenheimer had their publicity trails cut short by the industrial action and still banked impressively – just above and just below $1 billion respectively.

Read More