TOPLINE
DC Comics’ late-summer superhero movie Blue Beetle grossed roughly $9.8 million on its opening day at the U.S. box office, taking down Mattel’s Barbie after a month on top of the box office charts, though Blue Beetle’s opening still pales in comparison to rival Marvel’s recent releases, a lackluster start for DC’s latest movie, which cost a reported $104 million to make.
KEY FACTS
Blue Beetle has pulled in more than $13 million since its opening, including $3.3 million in Thursday previews, Deadline and Variety reported, taking down Barbie after 29 straight days on top of the U.S. box office, according to Box Office Mojo.
The DC movie is projected to make between $25 million to $32 million through Sunday, Variety reported, though Deadline puts it at $25 million, making it DC’s latest underperforming film as it struggles to compete with rival Marvel.
Its opening could also finish with less than half of the $55.1 million DC’s The Flash pulled in domestically over its opening weekend in June, though The Flash also struggled to meet expectations, falling short of its $70 million opening weekend projection, after the film faced controversy over harassment and disorderly conduct charges against star Ezra Miller.
By comparison, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 pulled in $118.4 million in its opening weekend in May, while Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania grossed $106.2 million in its opening weekend in February and Sony’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse grossed $120.7 million in its first weekend.
TANGENT
The DC movie has a 91% audience score and a 75% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, though critics have not been universally friendly, giving it a score of 61 out of 100 on Metacritic. A review in The Guardian lauded the movie for setting a “milestone for representation” as the first live-action Latino superhero film, but confessed the movie “suffers from overplayed beats,” due to the “fatigue from oversaturation” of a seemingly never ending string of Hollywood superhero movies. A New York Times review didn’t pull any punches either, calling the plot “boilerplate” and the superhero “not particularly compelling.”
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WHAT TO WATCH FOR
Barbie is just under $30 million short of surpassing The Super Mario Bros. Movie as the year’s highest-grossing movie at the domestic box office. Since its release, Barbie has pulled in $545.8 million in the U.S. and another $660.6 million internationally, according to data from Box Office Mojo, putting it just behind the Universal Pictures and Nintendo blockbuster, which has grossed more than $574.2 million domestically since its release on April 5. Barbie still has $110 million to go to catch up with James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, which has grossed more than $684 million in the U.S. since its December release.