The latest weekend box office numbers reveal that Disney/Marvel’s Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings is on track to surpass Black Widow as the highest-grossing movie of 2021. Despite worries about pandemic theater releases, Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings has sat at the top of the box office since its release three weeks ago. Even without a simultaneous streaming release, fans have proven willing to show up to theaters to support Marvel’s latest blockbuster.
September is commonly known as a “dump month” where American movie releases suffer from lower commercial and critical success due to factors such as lower disposable income among younger moviegoers and competition with the returning football season. Larger franchise movies generally aren’t released during this time and box office returns are usually lower. With general box office returns already lower due to the pandemic and some audiences preferring at-home streaming, Black Widow did not perform as well as it could have, pulling in the lowest box office returns for Marvel since 2015’s Ant-Man. Even with relatively low returns, Black Widow had the highest-grossing domestic box office results during the pandemic with $183.2 million.
According to Deadline, Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings is now set to pass Black Widow after a third successful weekend that saw the movie pull in $21.7 million, the second-best third-weekend September return after 2017’s It ($29.75 million). At $176.9 million, Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Rings is currently the second highest-grossing movie of the pandemic. As Shang-Chi’s success doesn’t seem to be waning, the Destin Daniel Cretton-directed movie is likely to break Black Widow’s record in the coming days. Current box office titles are nowhere near the Marvel movie, with the Ryan Reynolds-led Free Guy coming in at $5.2 million on its sixth weekend and Clint Eastwood’s latest film Cry Macho pulling in $4.5 million on its opening weekend.
One obvious distinction between the releases of Shang-Chi and Black Widow is the simultaneous release of the latter with Premier Access on Disney+. Two million households purchased Black Widow on Disney+ within the first two weekends. This results in an overall loss for Disney+, as once a movie is purchased on Premier Access, it can be viewed for as long as the account subscription is active by anyone with access to the account. This means that ‘two million households’ translates to far more than two million viewers, even though the streaming price of Black Widow is about twice that of a movie ticket. Having released only in theaters, Shang-Chi likely benefited from repeat viewers in addition to individual ticket sales.
Despite the success of Shang-Chi, for a Marvel movie, the box office returns are still not near what they were pre-pandemic. Shang-Chi’s opening weekend box office returns were $75.3 million while 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home opened at $92.5 million and was released in nearly the same amount of theaters. However, as audiences return to theaters, Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings’ continued success suggests that theaters are recovering and still proving profitable in the age of streaming.
Source: Deadline
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