Black panther is like 40% the strength of endgame tbf. Makes sense that it’s not causing that much damage (though deadline nums are certainly higher than what I had penciled)
Bad is relative. For some movies 30M is good, for some 700M is bad.
DS2 left a lot of money on the table relative to the hype it had from its story/concept hook. L&T down from rag admits and BP2 will be like 50% down from bp1’s.
Year had 3 huge movies in it, but I think it’s more informative to look at how it grossed considering what was released rather than how it grossed if you ignore what was released.
MCU box office has been bad this year but I think it’s more quality (and external factors, in this case) than franchise fatigue. Hopefully 2023 can provide some clarity (none of the movie’s have had a star die so as long as they get As they’re very “normal” to compare to pre-pandemic McU).
In practice I think expectations have been lowered enough from PS start and mon-wed that it would take missing 160 to cause true meltdowns around here.
Eternals was 7.5x, not 6
That said, the 28-50 previews are clearly in a different world than the 8-13M stuff, and have been the last 3. BP doing >6x is backloaded in context.
TDK, TWS, SM2, Aliens, Terminator, godfather, ESB are often considered better. Restricting myself to cases where the first entry is seen as good to great — otherwise very easy for the sequel to be better.