“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” tallied $114 million in domestic ticket sales this weekend, giving Walt Disney’s Marvel Studios a strong but tepid start to the aging franchise’s release.
The third installment of director James Gunn’s zany, classic rock-driven trilogy about a gun-toting raccoon, a talking tree and a band of misfits opened this weekend, starting a busy summer movie season. The latest movie did better in its debut weekend than the first “Guardians” in 2014 but not as well as the second movie in 2017.
Marvel has been in something of a slump for the past two years, with recent titles like “Eternals,” “Thor: Love and Thunder” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”—all of them costly, special effects-laden epics—failing to put up the heroic numbers at the box office that Walt Disney is accustomed to.
Still, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” is the 32nd consecutive Marvel release to debut No. 1 at the domestic box office, and the films have accounted for six of the 12 movies that have opened above $100 million since the start of the pandemic era, Disney said.
“The bar is set so high for Marvel that at $114 million, it might reflect some superhero market fatigue,” especially with sequels, said Paul Dergarabedian, an analyst with box-office tracker Comscore. However, any $100 million debut is impressive, he said, and a good start for the summer movie season.
The new “Guardians of the Galaxy” movie represents what many fans assume is a last hurrah for some of Marvel’s biggest and longest-tenured stars, including Chris Pratt, who has played the superhero team’s leader, Star Lord, in six different movies and two streaming series.
Mr. Pratt has said he would be willing to recapitulate the role in the future, but Disney hasn’t announced concrete plans for any more “Guardians” titles. Mr. Gunn, who recently went on a promotional tour for the movie, this year accepted a position to be co-chief of Warner Bros. Discovery’s DC Studios, Marvel’s biggest competitor and home of Batman and Superman.
At least two other big-name actors in “Guardians of the Galaxy,” Zoe Saldaña and Dave Bautista, have said they are done with the franchise.
Disney has said it is pivoting to a new phase of what is known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe with new casts, new comic-book story lines and new villains.
“Ant-Man” was both a critical and commercial flop that generated $474 million in global ticket sales after interest declined sharply following its opening weekend. Shortly after the movie opened, Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger warned that Marvel might be over-milking certain characters and publicly questioned the wisdom of making multiple sequels based on the same superhero story line.
“Sequels typically work well for us, but do you need a third or a fourth, for instance?” Mr. Iger asked at a March investor conference. “Or is it time to turn to other characters? There’s nothing in any way inherently off in terms of the Marvel brand. I think we just have to look at what characters and stories we are mining.”
There are some notable exceptions to the slump. “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” released about a year ago, earned $955 million worldwide, while “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” a co-production with Sony Pictures Entertainment, totaled nearly $2 billion.
“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” sold $859 million in tickets globally last year and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, but fell short of the $1.3 billion gross of the first “Black Panther” movie.
This year’s summer movie season will be a busier one, Mr. Dergarabedian said, with more movies scheduled to get a wider release than in 2022.
“This could be the first summer since pre-pandemic 2019 to see the industry’s biggest moviegoing corridor surpass the $4 billion domestic mark,” he said, referring to the period between the first Friday of May through the Labor Day weekend. In comparison, the summer total was $3.44 billion in 2022 and $1.76 billion in 2021.
Optimism for the summer was noticeable late last month at CinemaCon, where studio executives and exhibitors gathered at the largest industry convention for theater owners.
Buzzy movies including DC’s “The Flash” and Warner Bros. Pictures’ offbeat take on “Barbie” have buoyed expectations for the year, despite the prospect of a prolonged work stoppage by the Writers Guild of America, which has potential to slow production of new films going forward.
“Why are we off to such a great start? Well, the explanation is a simple one: We have more movies to play,” said John Fithian, departing director of the National Association of Theatre Owners, speaking in his state of the industry presentation at the Las Vegas convention.
He noted that in 2022, only 71 movies received wide release, meaning they were shown on more than 2,000 screens, while this year, there are more than 100 such titles being released.
“The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” co-produced by Illumination and Nintendo and distributed by Comcast’s Universal Pictures, continued to show its popularity. The movie finished second behind “Guardians” with a solid $18.6 million in domestic sales in its fifth weekend at theaters, Comscore said, and now has a global total of $1.16 billion.
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