While there have been plenty of noteworthy hits spread out across the year, 2023’s box office has largely been defined a great deal more than the titles that failed to perform as opposed to the ones that did.
Sure, the Barbenheimer phenomenon has yielded upwards of $2 billion between those two movies alone while the likes of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, John Wick: Chapter 4, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 to name but a few lived up to expectations, but there are just as many blockbusters to have flopped.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Flash, Fast X, Haunted Mansion, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and The Little Mermaid are just a smattering of the films to have either tanked spectacularly, failed to meet early projections, or set new franchise lows, and the latter trend looks set to continue into September.
According to the most recent data from Box Office Pro, no less than four returning IPs are on course to score the weakest opening weekends in their respective properties. The Equalizer 3, The Nun II, A Haunting in Venice, and EXPEND4BLES are the quartet in question, and if they come in at the bottom end of current tracking, then every single one of them will earn less than its predecessors.
It seems defeatist to predict the worst when these features haven’t even released yet, but after the sheer volume of commercial disappointments so far this year, you wouldn’t exactly bet against it.