Box Office Lessons from the Summer of Barbenheimer

Featuring Surprise Hits, Shocking Underperformances, and Outright Bombs

The third summer since the height of the pandemic brought the dominant storyline of Barbenheimer’s runaway success – but also some shocking underperformances and outright bombs.

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As summer winds down and the leaves and horror movie marathons of autumn beckon, a post-mortem on a roller coaster of a summer at the box office is due. The strike-impacted landscape ahead is murky as for the first time in years, the MCU juggernaut looks vulnerable and audience interest in superhero movies appears to be in decline. Stalwart, non-superhero franchises that were relied on to be major blockbusters to carry movie studios underperformed or failed, while a movie about a toy doll set box office records and a three-hour R-rated biopic isn’t far behind. 

So what lessons should Hollywood take from this strange Barbensummer?  

(This is all presented with the caveat that the strikes in Hollywood will shake up the next few years of releases.)

Superhero movies aren’t dead — but quality matters.

Looking at the most successful superhero movies since the beginning of 2022, it’s apparent that the superhero movies that do best are the movies that actually feel like more than just the standard issue studio fare. The five top-performing movies are, by domestic gross, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Batman, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, followed very closely by Thor: Love and Thunder. 

What all of these movies have in common is a director (or directors) with distinct senses of visuals and style – although it’s worth noting that these movies are of varying quality. Giving directors a chance to put their own stamp on Marvel or DC properties has borne fruit in the past. At the very least, audiences appear to be souring on films that just feel like the latest generic production to roll off a studio’s assembly line.

Superhero movies of poorer quality, the Shazam 2s, Black Adams, and Quantumanias of the world, certainly failed to resonate with audiences. 

If the superhero genre wants to avoid going the way of the Western or the musical, it needs to continue distinguishing its entries. A major strength of the genre, and a major reason for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s success, is how filmmakers are able to blend different influences into their superhero films, and that quality may be exactly what prolongs the genre’s lifespan.

With James Gunn’s (allegedly) new and improved DCEU coming down the pike, it may be more prudent for studios to pump the brakes on our favorite spandex-clad characters, or at least to focus on what a superhero movie can be besides, well, a superhero movie.

Counterprogramming is king.

The Barbenheimer phenomenon is the single best thing to come out of the summer.

There could be an entire book written about both of these movies’ successes.

But beyond the fact that both movies have resonated with audiences, it helps that they are extremely far apart in tone.   

Their success follows up one of the most surprising box office success stories of the last ten years: 2017’s The Greatest Showman, which became one of the most durable movies ever at the box office after leveraging a measly $8.8 million opening three-day weekend into a $174 million domestic gross. Its trick? It went to battle around Christmas of 2017 with The Last Jedi, the juggernaut that despite a mixed fan response still remains one of the 20 highest-grossing movies in history.

Families potentially suffering from Star Wars fatigue, or maybe even franchise fatigue, going to the theater to find anything could go see a musical that was about as far from space battles as possible.

Movie studios are consistently searching for the “four-quadrant” hit. What is likely to end up the second highest-grossing film of the year, The Super Mario Bros. Movie was marketed as a kids’ movie. Barbie aimed at female audiences. Other high-performing movies had an appeal that transcended age brackets, but the success of these movies suggests that it is still useful for studios to tailor certain films for certain audiences.

Endless franchising is no longer the answer.

A quick look at some of the largest underperformers suggests a significant measure of franchise fatigue. From Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to Transformers 7, audiences may be looking for more closure than anything else for some characters (the fact that Indy 5 was the conclusion is undermined by the fact that it’s the third ending for Indiana Jones in the franchise). 

In fact, two movies that were explicitly marketed as part ones — Fast X and Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part I – underperformed relative to their franchise histories. Maybe audiences are tired of big globe-trotting action movies. Or maybe an oversaturation of bloated summer blockbusters of generally middling quality is sapping the excitement from the multiplex. Say, speaking of which…

Don’t underestimate the importance of the release date!

The performance of the latest Mission Impossible film is one of the more perplexing storylines of the summer. By all accounts, Dead Reckoning: Part I was a well-liked action movie with a the paper-thin plot buoyed by a maniacally committed Tom Cruise. Its major problem – besides COVID-inflated production costs – was its release date, which was sandwiched between Dial of Destiny and Barbenheimer.  

The Flash also came out on the heels of summer’s other runaway hit, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. The two films dealt with very similar themes – multiverses, trauma-defined heroes. While The Flash’s flaws and awful CGI and strange marketing campaign and troubled production history all helped contribute to its bombing, could the film have performed better, even marginally so, if it was released further away from Across the Spider-Verse? It certainly had blockbuster written all over it in the studio’s eyes and it would have been impossible for Warner Bros. to know that Spider-Verse would touch on such similar subject material (it also hurt that audiences clearly rejected The Flash while embracing Spider-Verse so, ya know, quality does matter). 

This article also comes out right after news of Dune: Part Two’s delay to a crowded field next March. The ostensible reasons for the move – actors are unable to promote a star-driven movie based on a relatively niche IP – make sense, but Warner Bros. is also foreclosing the possibility of Dune having the run of IMAX theaters for more than a month. Is the studio limiting what the film can gross by moving it to a more crowded field? How hamstrung will the movie actually be without its stars supporting it? 

These dynamics will be fascinating to see play out in the coming year. Barbie’s success, coupled with the critical successes of Tetris and BlackBerry will lead to a boom in movies based on toys, while the future for superhero movies looks the most unclear it’s been since before the rise of the MCU. 

But let’s start by hoping that there is a box office next year for us to analyze.