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Box Office: Why Are So Many Sequels Bombing This Summer?

This article is more than 4 years old.

Photo Credit: Doane Gregory - © TM & © 2017 Marvel & Subs. TM and © 2017 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

It’s easy to look at the underwhelming run of sequels we’ve seen this year and argue that it proves a broader point that audiences are sick of sequels or IP sells. That would be fine, except Avengers: Endgame is still $46 million shy of Avatar’s $2.788 billion worldwide cume and John Wick: Chapter 3 has earned more than John Wick ($88 million) and John Wick: Chapter 2 ($171 million) combined. For that matter, DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World is the year’s biggest global grosser ($519 million) from Hollywood (sorry, China’s Wandering Earth) that isn’t a Walt Disney release. Sequels are still huge if they are presumed to be at least pretty good and/or offer something you can’t get elsewhere.

Shaft, Men In Black: International, Dark Phoenix and Godzilla: King of the Monsters are underperforming right alongside The Secret Life of Pets 2 and The LEGO Movie 2. But we were here before three summers ago. Summer 2016 saw a flurry of late May-to-late-July sequels (Independence Day: Resurgence), reboots (Ghostbusters) and revamps (The Legend of Tarzan) that didn’t click. At the time, I argued that the problem, aside from many of these films not being very good (or, in the case of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, was a superior sequel to a lousy reboot), was that a lot of them were franchises that once qualified as a big deal but now were merely that week’s court-appointed franchise tentpole.

It was Syndrome syndrome: When every franchise movie is special, none of them are. The other factor, one that more closely ties into this summer’s crop of IP plays, is that audiences now can rent or buy previous iterations of those same franchises for as little as a few bucks for at-home viewing in exceptionally high audio/visual quality. It’s not just that audiences are “sick of sequels and remakes.” It’s that they have access to superior versions of those same franchises available at home. There’s not nearly as much of a difference between the “feel” of Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy from 1999 and Tom Cruise’s The Mummy from 2017, especially when comparing either version to the original 1932 version of The Mummy.

If you have a decent HDTV and a halfway decent sound system, it’s all too easy to look at the lousy reviews for Tim Story’s Shaft and just rent John Singleton’s dynamite Shaft from 2000. Ditto paying $15 bucks-per-ticket (plus related theatrical time and expense) for Men in Black International versus putting your kids in pajamas, microwaving the popcorn and renting any of the prior Men in Black movies, at least two of which (the first and the third) are superior to the version that opened in theaters last weekend.  If Godzilla: King of the Monsters doesn’t look good, you can stay home with one of the 35 other Godzilla movies or the likes of The Meg, Pacific Rim, Rampage or several King Kong movies.

Some of this is about “added value elements,” which is essentially “Okay, but what do you have this time?” Marvel has mastered this, diversifying their franchise via different genres and new actors showing up as marquee characters each time out. The most obvious example is Captain America: Civil War, which offered Iron Man in a co-starring role, introductions for Black Panther and Spider-Man and the rest of the Avengers appearing in a plot that pits them against each other. Think Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, which added the Chippettes.  King of the Monsters thought it had plenty of added value, but general audiences didn’t know about or care about the other monsters. Hopefully, King Kong and Godzilla in the same movie will be “unique.”.

Universal

Happy Death Day 2U, LEGO Movie 2 and Secret Life of Pets 2 merely offered “more of the same.” Now “more of the same” isn’t automatically the kiss of death. Dark Phoenix offered more of the same of what audiences didn’t like/want about X-Men: Apocalypse and suffered for it. John Wick: Chapter 3 provided “more of what people loved about John Wick” and hit pay dirt. Sometimes it’s “more of a great thing” versus “more of a not great thing.” I’m sure Toy Story 4 will be just fine even though, as my oldest correctly snarked, “Those movies all have the same plot, there’s a new toy, and the toy gets lost or runs away, and they all have to find him again!”

When you have new versions of Men in Black and Shaft that seem to be knowingly less nuanced and less politically thoughtful than the previous incarnations, well, that’s both frustratingly regressive and (considering the box office results) a sign that studios are misreading their audiences. And, yes, sometimes it’s just that a sequel just isn’t very good. All these factors have combined in a scenario where, unlike generation’s past, it is arguably more accessible and cheaper to rent the older (and often superior) version of a given franchise than trek out to a theater and see a newer (and often inferior) version of that franchise. Why go to theaters for a bad X-Men movie when you can rent a good X-Men movie at home?

If you’re going to do a sequel or reboot, you need to make sure it’s either good enough or different enough (in a good way) from its predecessors that it justifies a theatrical watch. John Wick 3 can be “more of the same” if it is still excessively entertaining and at least different in terms of the core gimmick (the action sequences) from its predecessors. Avengers: Endgame and How to Train Your Dragon 3 successfully sold themselves as series finales and the end of an era. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle was an entirely different movie from Jumanji and had variables (the video game hook, the cast, the decent reviews) that justified itself. Conversely, Men in Black: International was sold as “more of the same.”

Heck, the two MCU two sequels that earned less in North America compared to their predecessors (Iron Man 2 and Avengers: Age of Ultron) were sold as “More of the same!” without any “new” hook. The sequels that are underperforming this year are struggling from being more of the same (The LEGO Movie 2, Godzilla: King of the Monsters), a repetition of disliked franchise tropes (Dark Phoenix), a new cast in a  boilerplate/passionless franchise installment (Men in Black: International, Shaft) and/or not generally being good enough (LEGO Movie 2 notwithstanding) to overcome those issues. The ones that are working (John Wick 3, Avengers 4 and presumably Toy Story 4) are differentiating themselves by the sheer quality and/or sheer “you can’t get this at home” theatrical value.

When considering a sequel, ask yourself: Did audiences like the last installment? Do viewers have a rooting interest in the protagonists? Do audiences want another go-around with this IP? Is there something that differentiates this newbie from previous franchise entries that audiences can rent for $5 on VOD? The sequels that are failing or underperforming this year aren’t measuring up in one or more of those variables. And the sequels that are breaking out are justifying their theatrical existence even when watching a previous version at home has never been easier, cheaper or more appetizing. Simply put, in a time when fewer consumers go to the movies just to go to the movies, the big question is, “Will anyone actually want to see this movie?”

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