Guardians 3 Could Be Successful After All

Movies

Marvel’s scrappiest group of misfits is carving out an underdog story more endearing than anything it’s put out in the movies in years. After a disappointing opening weekend, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 had mostly been written off as another Marvel underperformer, perhaps even a bomb. It was a great movie suffering for the string of duds that preceded it, a series of lousy films that tarnished the Marvel brand and left a bad taste in the mouths of an audience that once ravenously devoured each new MCU morsel. But in its second weekend, Guardians 3 pulled off an upset, retaining the top spot at the domestic box office with $62 million. That means it dropped only 47.6%, the lowest second-weekend drop for a Marvel film since Black Panther in 2018 and the second-lowest since Thor in 2011. How’s that for a comeback?

Undoubtedly, its relatively low opening weekend had a hand in this; there was less room to fall than a lot of Marvel’s other releases. But that doesn’t account for all of it; Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has a higher second weekend gross than Shang-Chi, Eternals, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and it’s just a few million behind Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. This is the result of good word of mouth; a look at the Cinemascore and Rotten Tomatoes audience score indicates that people really enjoyed this movie, and they likely told all their friends that this felt like old-school MCU. Now you’ve got not only repeat viewing but a hesitant portion of the audience taking a chance on something because people they trust liked it.

Guardians 3 currently sits at $536,135,723 worldwide, and it probably needs to clear $700-$750 million to break even and start turning a profit; that goal once seemed like a pipe dream but is now entirely possible. This weekend, its competition is Fast X, the latest in the Fast and the Furious franchise, which is tracking as high as $70 million but as low as $50 million domestically. I don’t think Guardians 3 will beat it, but it could hold its own enough to maintain a good size of the audience, especially if Fast X skews low. The weekend after that is The Little Mermaid, the newest live-action Disney remake, which is tracking to do $70-$90 million or possibly as much as $110 million domestically. Again, it’ll likely be number one that weekend, but depending on how well Fast X is received, Guardians 3 could hold its second-place status.

The biggest winner in this is James Gunn, who is about to attempt to revamp the DC movie franchise; after this weekend, he’s earned a lot more goodwill than he did after the decidedly mixed reaction to his DC slate announcement. On the surface, Disney and Marvel appear to be winners too, and if anyone making decisions over there has half a brain – or the slightest desire to make money – they will be. But I don’t think that’s their priority at the moment, and they may see this as “superhero fatigue” abating, or at least spin it that way. What they should see is that people will come out for a good movie, but they’ll stay home for the soulless dreck Marvel had been churning out till Gunn and the Guardians returned to theaters. But I think Bob Iger is too much of an ideologue now to let this turn his wayward ship away from the iceberg in its path. We may not get more good movies out of this from Marvel, but we can take heart that we have this one, a parting gift from someone who knows how to move, provoke, and entertain an audience and is getting ready to do it again at a different studio.