MORBIUS opening | March 2022 box office figures vs. 2019/20 | Pandemic | April 1 to 3, 2022 weekend
Opening weekend box office numbers, charts and commentary
The current weekend: April 1 to 3, 2022
1) Morbius opening
- This is a weak opening by Marvel's exceptional standard for launching a new superhero series. The weekend figure is well below average for a Marvel first episode, and below average compared with a DC Comics new series, as well. The Morbius character started within the Spider-Man story, as did the Venom character. Venom 1 opened to $80.1m in October 2018 and finished with an outstanding $856.1m worldwide. Marvel leads this category — this is at the low end of it.
- This is the fourth Marvel series launched during the pandemic (Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Eternals, Morbius). The previous openings were in the $70m to $80m range. Marvel movies are generally very well reviewed; here reviews are uncharacteristically poor:
- Five Marvel and DC sequels will arrive later this year: Marvel's Dr. Strange 2 (May 6), Thor 4 (Jul 8), and Black Panther 2 (Nov 11), and DC's Black Adam spin-off (Oct 21) and Shazam! 2 (Dec 16).
2) March 2022 box office numbers
- March was a very good month at the domestic box office. The 4-week total was down -13% compared with the same most recent non-pandemic weeks in March. These comparisons have a lot to do with how the releases line up in each year. In this case, Batman, Uncharted, The Lost City, Jujutsu, and Dog compare respectably well with Onward, Invisible Man, Us, Wonder Park, and two follow-up weeks of Captain Marvel.
- This is a very good step forward for the business. The diversity of recent genres is helping broaden audiences among family, older and female moviegoers. However, it’s by no means time to celebrate, because around the corner for comparison purposes is Avengers: Endgame. That movie — the #2 all-time box office champ (Avatar re-took the top spot with its international re-release in 2020) — opened on April 26, 2019, and it's going to crush all comparisons between 2022 and 2019.
- Still, moviegoing is showing real improvement. We continue to have our eye on -20% as a sustainable target for the domestic business by the end of the year:
* For this comparison, we are using the first two weeks of March 2020 and the last two weeks of March 2019. There was news of the pandemic during the second week of March 2020, and some international markets were starting to close, but the meltdown did not happen until the third week of the month. The second week of March 2020 was driven by Onward's opening and the second week of Invisible Man — not huge. That's how they line up, so that's what we're using.
3) Pandemic
- New Covid cases in the U.S. continue to drift lower, to around 27,500 per day, after falling sharply from the most recent peak of 806,795 in mid-January. The dominant variant is now BA.2, and it's more contagious than Omicron, but so far there's been no surge in the number of new cases, helped by the 65% of the U.S. population that's fully vaccinated, and the 24% of the population that's already had a Covid case (and probably more than that if unreported cases were counted). (All figures CDCP/NY Times.)
- Experts are mixed on whether a new surge will occur. At the moment, most Americans are going about their lives, setting aside concern about the pandemic, and getting out, and it’s showing at the box office.