If you're both a box-office geek and a Marvel Cinematic Universe fan like I am, I've got a bit of bad news: in its second week-end of release, the latest MCU entry, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness has dropped a steep 67% from its soaring opening weekend gross of $187 million in North America down to an estimated $61 million dollars To put this into perspective, the much reviled 2003 film The Hulk (also produced by MCU head honcho Kevin Feige in his pre-MCU days, incidentally) had a similar 1st to 2nd weekend plummet, though of course it did not start out with such a mighty first weekend. All told, the second weekend of DS2 is the kind of opening weekend most studios would kill to have, especially in post-pandemic times. In terms of global box-office, the film experienced a 60% drop-off from its opening week-end take, which is more important to this discussion, for reasons to be explained below.
This has to be some cause for concern among the head honchos at Marvel, who have included front-loading into their box-office projections by now and who can usually expect between 50% to 60% percent 2nd weekend drops. This movie, by rights, should have been in the upper echelons of Marvel's usual box-office hauls, considering the pedigree of those involved in the movie. It is, after all, Sam Raimi's first movie in almost ten years and his first superhero movie since 2007's Spider-Man 3.
So what happened? Was it a really bad movie? I certainly didn't think so, and with a 74% "Fresh" critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and with a verified audience score of 86%, I can reasonably say that a fair number of people agree with my assessment. Also, its higher-than-expected box-office drop notwithstanding, it's still the number #1 movie in most of the world, so there's that. So why the higher-than-usual attrition?
I'd just like to propound my own theory, and I'm fairly confident that I'm not alone in this.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness marks the first Marvel Cinematic Universe film that makes direct reference to the series of shows that Marvel launched on Disney+ last year. Specifically, DSITMOM serves as a direct sequel to Wandavision, the inaugural Marvel series that featured Elizabeth Olsen's Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany's Vision living in a small town called Westview, despite the fact that Vision had died at the hands of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. That series ended with the revelation that, in her grief, Wanda had created a new Vision and even two children and had placed an entire small town in her magical thrall. It also ended with Wanda losing both the Vision and her magically-conjured offspring. To be entirely fair to Marvel head honcho Kevin Fiege, he was quite transparent about these plans quite early on, when he announced Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness months before the COVID-19 pandemic threw a monkey wrench in everyone's plans.
That said, there are a number of problems with this creative decision, some of which have admittedly been compounded by things beyond Feige's control.
Among people who have watched Wandavision there are a vocal number of viewers, including film critics, who feel that Wanda's turn from where she was at the end of that series to the full-on villain she has become by DSITMOM was somewhat abrupt and should not have happened off-camera. Still others are annoyed that Wanda has essentially stolen the show from Stephen Strange, even though the story itself is about how Strange and Wanda learn to deal with their own personal losses very differently.
And THEN there are the droves of other fans from different countries all over the world, who do not have the benefit of being able to legally watch Disney+, and who therefore have no idea what the heck has happened to Wanda after the events of Avengers: Endgame. While it would be unfair to blame Kevin Feige for the Walt Disney company's inability to make Disney+ available in every possible territory, I think it would fair to hold him responsible for his failure to foresee how a hiccup like this could negatively impact the storytelling of the films. A lot of fans feel they have missed out on a major chapter in the character's journey. This might not have mattered as much to the North American viewers who have ready access to Disney+, but it may have made a significant difference in outside territories that, for going on three years running now, still do not have Disney+. A 60% drop is not exactly insignificant.
All of that said, DSITMOM is still destined to make a fortune at the global box-office, with a final projected gross of over $850 million and an outside chance at the coveted $1 billion, but with the level of hype behind it, plus Marvel's built-in fan loyalty this was always a given. I can't help but wonder, though, if Marvel will start to think about money they may have left on the table by tying their film so intimately into their Disney+ series. Sam Raimi's return to Marvel, after all, should, with theaters opening up quite a bit nowadays, have been an easy billion and not this emerging question mark as to whether it can actually make ten-figure territory.
If a near-sure billion-dollar hit like this film can suffer what appears to be a bit of backlash for tying it so intimately into a TV series that not everyone around the world can watch, how does this bode for other series that are even MORE intimately tied into Disney+ series? How might this impact Captain America 4, which will directly follow up the events of the Disney+ series Falcon and the Winter Soldier, or The Marvels, which is set to include a character set to make her debut in a Disney+ series this August? Notably, to celebrate the launch of the world's first Pakistani superhero, namely Ms. Marvel, Disney is making the unique and unprecedented move of reformatting all of the episodes of the TV series for theatrical release in Pakistan alone, for the simple reason that they still don't have Disney+ there. If only we could all get that kind of accommodation.
Time will tell if Marvel can sustain its Phase 4 momentum with this new, added burden it is essentially putting on its viewers: to keep up with series that many of them cannot even watch.
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