‘Blue Beetle’: Second-Weekend Drop Can Make Things Even Worse for the Latest DC Movie
There’s bad, and there’s also worse. That’s how we could describe the current era of DC movies, at least according to their commercial results. It’s been almost 18 months since DC released a commercially successful movie, and even longer if we only consider DCEU movies. No DCEU movie that was released since 2019 managed to earn more than $400 million worldwide, despite the positive reviews that some of them, such as ‘The Suicide Squad’ or ‘Blue Beetle’ received.
Following box-office failures of this year’s ‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ and ‘The Flash,’ we were all ready for the same thing to happen to ‘Blue Beetle.’ The movie grossed a little over $40 million worldwide during the opening weekend, and for comparison, ‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ opened with $65.5 million, and ‘The Flash’ with $139 million. To be clear, it’s not the movie’s fault that it turned out to be a flop. A lot of worse movies were blessed with decent box-office results, but the fact is that ‘Blue Beetle’ was released at the worst possible time, and the movie never had a fair chance to succeed.
After a disappointing opening weekend, ‘Blue Beetle’ is facing a significant second-weekend drop!
When predicting box-office results, two important factors must be considered. Every movie getting theatrical release hopes to earn as much as possible during the opening weekend. However, keeping it steady during the second weekend is also important. Suppose a second-weekend drop is below 50%. In that case, that is considered a successful second weekend. If it’s between 50-60%, that’s not great but not terrible, and a drop over 60% is considered an unsuccessful second weekend.
According to Deadline, Blue Beetle is expected to earn only $10 million domestically during the second weekend, which would be a drop of 60% percent, which is still a significant drop. At this point, it’s even hard to say if the movie will cover its budget, which both ‘Fury and the Gods’ and ‘The Flash’ managed to do despite commercial failures. ‘The Flash’ opened with $55 million domestically, but the second-weekend drop of 72.5% was too much for a movie to recover.
At the end of the day, one thing is for sure: ‘Blue Beetle’ was never given a proper chance to succeed. Releasing this movie now, when everyone knows that DCEU is counting down its last few months of existence, the lack of promotional work because of the strikes in Hollywood, no matter how many positive reviews the movie received, it just wasn’t destined to become anything more than a commercial failure.
With such an unsuccessful beginning of a theatrical run, ‘Blue Beetle’ will most likely hit digital services very soon. We don’t know what results the movie will achieve on home distribution, but with everything going on, it looks like this is really the perfect time to let DCEU die and start hoping that James Gunn’s ‘Superman: Legacy’ will mark a new beginning for DC Studios and its cinematic universe.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Did ‘Blue Beetle’ deserve to become another DC flop? Let us know in the comments.
