From the tale of a boxer's redemption to a stripper's last hurrah, the first half
of 2023 has produced a number of films that made much less money than their producers had hoped.
"Renfield" opened to a measly $10 million on a $65 million budget,
facing stiff competition from other April releases like "The Pope's Exorcist" and
"The Super Mario Bros. Movie." Given that the character of Dracula has had a haunting legacy
in horror for the past century, viewers who came to watch "Renfield" expecting a
scary movie were disappointed to find that the comedy aspects were a bit too dominant.
"To most, I am known simply as—"
"Renfield's boss!"
Horror films are known to be profitable at the box office, given their generally low
production costs and high demand from fans. "Renfield" faced direct competition from "The
Pope's Exorcist," which was made on a much lower budget of $18 million and was solely focused on
delivering a horror experience — and it ended up with a worldwide gross of nearly $75 million as
a result. Additionally, Universal's decision to release "Renfield" just a week after their
own commercial juggernaut, "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," could be deemed questionable,
highlighting the lack of faith the distribution company may have had in its scrappy horror comedy.
"The Pope's Exorcist" producer Jeff Katz took to Twitter to say —
"Looks like [The Pope's Exorcist] is coming in ahead of RENFIELD to debut
in second place this weekend ... Beating our direct competition — who had double
our marketing spend and more than 3x our production budget — is a nice little win."
Katz continued in another tweet —
"The moral of the story is that genre pictures should generally only be made
for a smart price. Whole point is to be able to hit singles and doubles and still potentially
come back for more. POPE's will be profitable for Sony entirely because of this approach."
Shazam truly did face the fury of the box office gods this year. Raking in $30.5
million in its opening weekend, "Shazam! Fury of the Gods" had the worst opening for
a DCEU film that wasn't released during the pandemic. With a worldwide take of just over
$130 million — on a $110 million budget and with another $100 million spent in marketing
costs — it would be an understatement to say that the film was a box-office disappointment.
A growing sense of "superhero fatigue" among audiences, lack of positive word of mouth, and
mediocre critical reception are just some of the reasons that contributed to "Shazam! 2" flopping.
The announcement of a rebooted DC Universe by James Gunn and Peter Safran may have lowered
audience interest in existing DCEU narratives, and competition with "The Super Mario Bros. Movie"
and "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves" proved to be a fatal blow to "Fury of the Gods."
This wasn't a surprise for director David F. Sandberg,
however, who made a now-deleted comment on Reddit saying —
"I saw where this was heading a long time
ago. I'll be alright though. I got paid all my money upfront."
Lead star Zachary Levi tweeted his own take on the film's disappointing reception, writing —
"I think the biggest issue we're having is marketing. This is a perfect family movie,
and yet a lot of families aren't aware of that. Which is just a shame."
"It's all about family!"
"Family!"
"65" is an original science-fiction film that's not part of a larger franchise — a
rare creature these days. Adam Driver and Ariana Greenblatt play a starship
pilot and young girl as their ship crashes on a dinosaur-infested Earth,
forcing them to adapt to the perilous habitat of our prehistoric planet.
The film's marketing banked on Driver's fan following,
so much so that the film has colloquially been referred to as "Adam Driver's 65" to make up
for an ambiguous and rather bland title. The problem? Driver's star power hasn't
necessarily proved to be a box office draw outside of the "Star Wars" sequel
trilogy — especially considering that the budget for "65" was reported to be around $91 million.
This expensive film was also released in March 2023, a month when audiences
had several other films to choose from for their cinema-going experience. "65"
competed with franchise flicks that many fans eagerly looked forward to,
such as "Scream VI," "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania," and "Creed III," along with
remnants from the previous year "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish" and "Avatar:
The Way of Water." The poor word of mouth and critical reception didn't seem to help, either.
Guy Ritchie's films have always been hit or miss. His 2019 Disney live-action remake of "Aladdin"
grossed a little over $1 billion worldwide, while his historical epic "King Arthur: Legend of the
Sword" from two years earlier turned out to be a major box office disappointment. Ritchie's latest
spy flick, "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre," proved its poor fortune with a meager $3.1 million
domestic opening and a worldwide gross of $37 million against an estimated $50 million budget.
The film's poor box office showing wasn't surprising, however, as many trade experts
foretold its inevitable financial doom. "Operation Fortune" was marred with multiple delays in its
release — it was initially slated for a January 2022 release before it was
delayed until March due to a spike in COVID-19 cases through the United States. After that,
it was pulled again indefinitely — this time, simply due to bad luck. As it turns out,
the majority of the film's villains are Ukrainian — a coincidence that producers
felt was in poor taste considering the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Financial problems also plagued production studio STX, with its
merger and restructuring further putting the release of "Operation
Fortune" in doubt. As a result, the film suffered from poor marketing,
and its final release date was announced just a few weeks before its March 2023 release. This
gave the film very little time to build any hype for audiences amid hefty competition.
"God damn it! I do the stunts, you shoot the money! Wake up, everybody!"
Since its release in mid-April, "Beau Is Afraid" has made a total of around
$10 million on a budget of $35 million – A24's most expensive film to date. With
such a large budget for an indie project, writer-director Ari Aster was given complete
free reign to paint grandiose strokes of his distinctively absurdist style. Unfortunately,
this creative freedom may have doomed it in the end, as many critics and audience
members found the three-hour epic to be overly self-indulgent in its presentation.
It's not unreasonable for A24 to have expected big returns from Aster's third outing. Not only
was his project bolstered by the star power of Joaquin Phoenix, but the director's previous two
films proved that there's an audience for his unique brand of movie-making. In 2018,
"Hereditary" made over $81 million on a budget of $10 million — and 2019's
"Midsommar" turned $9 million into 46. Compared to "Beau Is Afraid," the budgets
for both these films were quite modest — a major factor in their profitability.
Even though "Beau Is Afraid" topped the 2023 indie box office with a record
collection of $320,396 from four theaters in its opening weekend,
it's likely that the film will go down as a huge financial loss for A24.
We don't mean to pick on Guy Ritchie, but audiences simply didn't flock to his newest
pair of films the way they did to "Sherlock Holmes." The filmmaker's second release in 2023,
"Guy Ritchie's The Covenant," is his best-reviewed movie to date, with an 82% rating on Rotten
Tomatoes. However, the film's critical achievement was overshadowed by its significant financial
failure, making a worldwide gross of just $17 million on a bloated $55 million budget.
"Guy Ritchie's The Covenant" is nothing like any of Ritchie's other films:
it's much more tonally grounded and pensive without the wit or style that the rest of
the director's filmography boasts. Even after attaching the filmmaker's name to the title,
it failed to draw in fans of other Ritchie films like "Snatch" and "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."
The bomb could be blamed on the film's minimal marketing, as well as its distribution model: it
was released in just over 2600 theaters stateside, with no theatrical release internationally.
"The Covenant" was distributed by MGM in the U.S., while the international distribution
and post-theatrical streaming rights were relegated to Amazon Prime Video — making it
a direct-to-streaming film in other countries. As with "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre," which
was released just a month earlier, "The Covenant" was produced by STXfilms — and
their recent financial problems also likely impacted the film's marketing and release.
With a $40 million budget plus $20 million for marketing, Magic Mike's final outing proved to be
the most expensive as well as the least profitable in its franchise. While "Magic Mike's Last Dance"
topped the box office in its opening weekend with a collection of $8.2 million, the film
ended its theatrical run with a worldwide gross of $56 million — a far cry from the profitability
of its predecessors. In comparison, 2012's "Magic Mike" earned a total global gross of $170 million,
while its 2015 sequel "Magic Mike XXL" made a total of $123 million worldwide.
"If you were to do this just like one last time…"
"Mhm."
"...how much would something like that go for?"
"Magic Mike's Last Dance" was produced to be an HBO Max exclusive, but Warner
Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav opted to give the film a wide theatrical release. However,
given that it had been nearly eight years since the release of the previous film,
audiences weren't as keen to catch up with the franchise. As the third movie shifted its focus
to Mike and newcomer Max's romance, the ensemble cast that made the prior two movies so popular
was virtually absent. Members of Mike's troupe "Kings of Tampa" appear only briefly at the
end of "Last Dance," which wasn't enough for those who had been expecting their presence.
"Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion
of the World" chronicles the rise, fall, and rise again of boxing legend and entrepreneur
George Foreman. Produced on a $32 million budget, which made it the most expensive
project of Christian production studio Affirm Films, "Big George Foreman" was
projected to earn $5 million in its opening weekend, but it only brought in three.
While the high budget wasn't entirely unreasonable, the film's failure could be
attributed to inadequate marketing and a lack of clear focus on its target audiences. "Big George
Foreman" was split on its advertising, attempting to appeal to both Christian
audiences and sports fans. The film didn't win over either group very well, with the
former considering the film too "mainstream" and the latter finding it too religious.
Faith-based films are generally produced on modest budgets, which is a significant component
of their profitability. It's not like Christians aren't going to the movies: Lionsgate's "Jesus
Revolution" grossed $52 million on a budget of $15 million, while the indie biblical tale "His
Only Son" raked in an impressive $12 million from a mere $250,000. With a total global gross of just
$5.2 million so far, "Big George Foreman" shows no signs of recovering its $35 million budget.
For nearly half a century, author Judy Blume refused any offers for the
film rights to her bestselling 1970 novel "Are You There God? It's Me,
Margaret." That changed when producer James L. Brooks and writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig
convinced the author that the two would do the story justice on the big screen.
"I love the movie! And how many authors of the book can say,
'I think that movie was better than the book.'"
"Oh, wow."
While the faithful film adaptation of the 1970 novel was released to rave reviews
from both critics and audiences, "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" opened to a
disappointing $6.8 million. It would be a difficult road for the film to recover its
$30 million budget, considering that it's geared towards a very specific audience.
Despite the story's timeless themes, the non-contemporary 1970s setting could have
had a detrimental effect on the film's appeal with its target demographic of
young girls. Given that the film primarily attracted women over 45 who grew up with
the book rather than its intended target audience of teen and preteen girls, a lack
of clarity regarding who this movie was for may be the main reason it ended up bombing.