Over at Badass Digest, Devin Faraci looks at Amazing Spider-Man 2 and it’s slightly disappointing box office returns. Yes yes, it has made $630 million globally, so it is hardly After Earth 2, but someone either at Sony or in an attempt to embarrass Sony leaked that they were expecting to make $1 billion worldwide…and
The global box office is harder to track across all five films; the global marketplace has exploded in the 12 years since the first movie was released. What we can do is see that the reboot made $752 million globally, and that Sony was feeling so confident in this new film that they in-house projected it to reach one billion dollars, that new global magic supernumber. I remember when a movie making $100 million domestic was a big deal – now that’s an opening weekend! One billion bucks is where it is when it comes to these mega-franchises.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will not make one billion dollars.
Where this gets interesting is that Sony has huge plans to spin out Spider-man into at least one a year, with Spider-Man 3 directed by Marc Webb due in 2016, and a stand-alone Sinister Six movie before that, with shooting to begin in 2015 and a standalone Venom also due. Faraci speculates that that plan may be in jeopardy given the drop off in Spider-man’s appeal:
I think they’re going to back off the expanded universe idea. There’s barely an appetite for Spider-Man, so what interest is there in his villains? I want only the best for Drew Goddard, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Sinister Six, previously scheduled to shoot in January, sort of fades away. Sony needs to focus on The Amazing Spider-Man 3 first, and any good ideas that could have gone into a Sinister Six movie should get folded into the third film. In fact it seems absolutely bizarre to me that there was going to be a Sinister Six before The Amazing Spider-Man 3, considering what a shitty job The Amazing Spider-Man 2 did setting them up.
Again, all speculation, but doing it Marvel’s way ain’t as easy as it looks.
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There are 18 movies that ever managed to break 1 billion dollar. Setting the exception for your movie at that threshold seems pretty … ambitious.
633 million still makes it the 75th most successful movie ever (not adjusted for inflation).
Despite the fact that I think it’s silly to consider a movie that has already made 2/3 of a billion dollars worldwide “a flop”, if this gets Sony to reconsider their horribly, horribly misconceived idea of spinning off Spider-man villains into their own movie franchises then yippy-damn-skippy.
I understand that they’re pissed that they have missed the boat on the superhero franchise model since they only bought the rights to Spider-man when Marvel was having their bankruptcy fire sale almost two decades ago (Grod I’m old), but damn – suck it up and find something else to make movies about. Hell the superhero model is going to start burning people out again sometime in the next few years – see if you can be the ones to find the “next big thing” instead of trying to copy the current successful model for a change.
It’s one of the most expensive movies produced and marketed of all-time.
Maybe if they keep adding more villains to the third movie they’ll have more luck…
It’s not super hard either, though. The movie is crap. It’s flaws should have been evident to anyone with six brain cells who read the script. It’s not that people are tired of spidey, it’s that there hasn’t been a good movie in a decade!
Who is the Keeper of the Flame at Sony?
Who is in charge of the character’s development?
Who has the giant dry-erase board that shows The Big Picture?
If Sony wants to be as audacious as Fox and Disney, they need to plan out character development, villain origins, foreshadowing ten years out.
They’ve got to plan rising action in each movie, and then make each movie part of a rising action outline for the series, so that each movie is bigger than the one before, generating repeated viewings both online and on screen.
It’s Levitz’ A-B-C plot, except each movie has a plot resolution. By the time you get to “J”, there are plot lines from A, C, F, as well as subplots b, g, h and a few cameos made starring roles.
(Eddie Brock, Peter’s competition at the Bugle, becomes Venom.
The invisible nerdy girl from Peter’s high school becomes the Black Cat.
Jonah slowly simmers, and eventually funds the Spider Slayers, and gets blackmailed as a result.
The Kingpin is a mysterious figure funding super-criminals.
The Tinkerer is more visible.
This leads to competition between Kingpin and Osborn, resulting in a superpowered gangwar, with Spidey in the middle (with Venom and Black Cat, and other allies.)
No idea if Warners is doing this level of planning.
No idea to what degree Marvel is, aside from AoS.
@Torsten: Kingpin has presumably reverted back to Marvel along with Daredevil. But other than that, it’s a pretty solid summary.
Me, I’m hoping it’s just that people are sick of seeing the same damn story retold over and over again. We didn’t need Spider-Man’s origin story twice in a decade.
Then again, Batman’s been doing a pretty good job of riffing on a couple of Frank Miller comics from the mid-1980′s over and over and over and over and over again.
SM2 does toss in some possible advance-warnings, though the average viewer may not know what to make of the names “Felicia” and “Smythe,” as the film gives them no reason to think that the characters are anything but spear-carriers. When I heard the latter name, I immediately theorized that the producers were finally going to find some way to work in the suspiciously absent figure of Jonah Jameson for the next film. Now it seems dubious as to whether there will even be a third film.
OTOH, the absence of Jameson may just mean that the filmmakers can’t think of an approach that would wipe J.K. Simmons from viewers’ minds.
Doing it Marvel’s way when you have morons running the franchise was never going to be easy.
Maybe I’m just a cranky old man…. But how about instead of planning franchises and crossovers people just focus on making self-contained movies that are as a good as possible? I’d have been more excited to see a sequel to Amazing Spiderman if I liked the first one a bit more. And honestly the crossover/Shield elements of the recent Marvel films are the things I’m least interested in.
@James T, you got a good laugh out of me.
I’ll second what Dave Roman said. Sure Marvel movies made lots of money, but probably best of them is first Iron Man which didn’t really have anything outside of post credit scene that would hint at some mega franchise being built.
Similar problem was encountered with Green Lantern movie, they tried to drop lots of hints and leave various plot points for sequels… and ended up having shallow movie.
I hope it will tamp down Sony’s plans. Them and Fox, so desperate to create their own cinematic universe and have some of what Marvel’s going, flooding the market in the process; and isn’t the new Star Wars all about building that type of thing as well? Does the world really need a Gambit film, let alone a Venom one?
And at the end of the day, it comes down to the quality and craft of the individual films. I’m glad this forgotten element (forgotten by the studios, that is) will be the judge of their plans.
“Will underperforming Amazing Spider-Man 2 tamp down Sony’s expansion plans?”
Let’s hope so!!