Box office: The Marvels, Journey to Bethlehem get the holiday season off to a rocky start

The big-budget superhero flick and the low-budget "faith-based" film both set record or near-record lows for their respective genres.

Brie Larson as Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel in The Marvels. Higher, further, faster… just not at the box office.

The holiday season got off to a late and rocky start at the box office this week, as two new wide releases set record or near-record lows for their respective genres.

The Marvels, the 33rd film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, had the worst opening of the entire franchise with an estimated $47 million, and there was no room at the inn for the Nativity musical Journey to Bethlehem, which had one of the worst wide openings ever for a biblical or “faith-based” film with a mere $2.4 million.

The Marvels not only had a worse opening than any previous MCU film—the previous lowest opening belonged to the franchise’s second movie, The Incredible Hulk, which opened to $55.4 million in 2008—it also did worse than most other Marvel and DC films over the past quarter-century, even before adjusting for inflation.

There are several theories as to why The Marvels did so poorly:

• “Superhero fatigue”: More and more superhero movies are just failing at the box office. A few, like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, have opened big and dropped precipitously in the weeks that followed, but many, like Blue Beetle and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, have simply failed to open big in the first place.

• The Disney+ factor: The Marvels is not only a sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel, it is also a sequel to WandaVision and especially Ms. Marvel, with a bit of Hawkeye besides—and most moviegoers simply haven’t watched those shows. On top of all that, The Marvels features Nick Fury and the Skrulls, who were last seen a few months ago in Secret Invasion, a Disney+ series that was one of the worst-rated MCU projects ever and may have soured some fans on the characters.

• The actors’ strike: The strike ended just one night before the movie came out, so the film’s lead actors were able to do some last-minute promotion for the film, but this movie hinges on the chemistry between its three lead actresses, and it presumably would have helped if the three of them had been out there longer, doing the interviews and getting viewers interested in their camaraderie.

• Bad marketing: Some observers have said there was less advertising for this film than they would have expected at comic conferences and the like. Also, there were some jarring shifts in tone between the early, wackier trailers that played up the female trio and the final trailer which gave us sombre images of dead or retired heroes who haven’t been seen onscreen since 2019’s Avengers: Endgame.

Whatever the reason, you can’t exactly say audiences weren’t ready for a movie about girl empowerment—not in the year of Barbie and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.

As for Journey to Bethlehem… well, that film was under the radar for most mainstream movie journalists, so there hasn’t been much punditry about that film’s box-office performance at all. But the film didn’t have any major stars (aside from Antonio Banderas as the villain), it too may have suffered from the actors’ strike and a lack of marketing (outside of the usual “faith-based” channels), and I think the mix of biblical narrative and musical comedy may have been a hard sell for some people.

One key difference between the two films, though: The Marvels reportedly cost $220 million to produce—which seems cheap next to some of this year’s box-office disappointments!—whereas Journey to Bethlehem cost only $6 million. So the Bible movie has a much better chance of making its money back soon-ish.

The question now is what sort of “legs” these movies will have.

Journey to Bethlehem is a Christmas movie and could stay afloat through the holiday season… but the season hasn’t really even started yet. Advent doesn’t begin until December 3, and Christmas itself is still a month and a half away. There is a very good chance that digital rentals will be the only way to see this film by Christmas Day.

As for The Marvels, it got a lousy-for-Marvel B CinemaScore from the people who did see it this weekend, which ranks down there with Eternals and the aforementioned Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. So it will probably fold fairly quickly. It might even be the first MCU movie that fails to gross $100 million in North America.

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: