New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

When is too much not enough? No, these aren’t lyrics to a break-up song. This is an uncomfortable conversation involving two of the highest profile releases of 2015. Both films enjoyed lofty expectations prior to release. Each one did well enough on its own to place them in the top eight domestic performers of the year as well as the top 13 in terms of global revenue…and yet something is missing.

Entering 2015, The Avengers: Age of Ultron stood out as the most anticipated film of the year or, at worst, 1A to Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 appeared poised to cement the film franchise as one of the most successful ever. Sure, each title had its detractors, but virtually everyone on the outside looking in at both titles believed that they would dominate the box office. And they kind of did. The problem is that they mostly didn’t. That’s what leads us to this unexpected discussion regarding how two of the top releases of 2015 somehow failed while succeeding.

The Avengers is quite possibly the perfect movie project of the 2000s. BOP named it the second biggest Film Industry Story of 2012. At the time, I noted with admiration how Marvel Studios had built from the ground up. At the start of 2008, nobody cared about Iron Man, a comic book character long perceived as a knock-off of Batman, which he totally was. Fast forward to today and an argument can be made that Iron Man is every bit as popular as his cape-clad DC Comics compatriot and an equal box office draw. He is the unquestioned lead of the superhero team I described in 2012 as the stars of “the seminal movie of our generation.”

In the years that followed the release of The Avengers, every comic book character involved received a post-blockbuster bump from the project. Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier both improved their opening weekends by more than 30% while boosting their combined global earnings by over half a billion.

Iron Man 3 especially benefited from the prevailing goodwill from The Avengers. It achieved several box office feats, starting with a stunning $174.1 million opening weekend. It then joined the exclusive $400 million domestic box office club followed by the (then) even more exclusive $1.2 billion box office club, something only half a dozen features had done to that point.

Clearly, the popularity of The Avengers operated as the rising tide that lifted all boats. Given the tremendous box office expansion across the various Marvel brands, it was reasonable to expect that the best was yet to come. After all, the follow-up film featuring the entire roster plus a couple of important new additions should tear up the box office.

The logic was similar for the final Hunger Games movie. We’d lauded the original franchise adaptation as one of the other biggest Film Industry Stories of 2012 (it was a big year). We similarly lauded The Hunger Games: Catching Fire the following year. This franchise started out bigger than Twilight and was already surpassing Harry Potter’s best domestic numbers after two films.

Continued:       1       2       3