With Sunday’s Oscars marking the official end of awards season, prestige fare is taking center stage this weekend — meaning you could consider Birds of Prey, the standalone film for Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, a sort of candy-coated counterprogramming. Unfortunately, the contrast didn’t entirely pay off for Warner Bros., as the Suicide Squad follow-up/spin-off fell considerably short of expectations with a disappointing $33.25 million opening from 4,236 locations. So, how to explain the film’s underperformance?
On a surface level, Birds of Prey seemed to have everything going for it heading into the weekend – fan-beloved lead character (Harley Quinn), popular actress at the height of her career (Margot Robbie), high-flying Rotten Tomatoes score (81%) and status as the weekend’s sole new wide release. But when you peek beneath the hood, there are some apparent issues that could help account for its underwhelming debut.
You could start with the film’s R rating – rare for a comic book film aside from such recent harder-edged, tonally unique entries like Logan and 10-time Oscar nominee Joker, which saw director Todd Phillips bringing a Taxi Driver-style grittiness to the DC villain’s origin story. From a tonal perspective, Birds of Prey has much more in common with Fox’s two R-rated Deadpool movies, which boast a similarly flippant sense of humor and wildly charismatic antihero at their center. But unlike Deadpool, which benefitted greatly from both a years-long, fan-driven development process and a truly brilliant marketing campaign, Birds of Prey simply didn’t enjoy the same level of built-up audience demand and zeitgeist-capturing momentum.
It’s also difficult to overlook the film’s connection to Suicide Squad, the 2016 DCEU entry which, while hugely successful at the box office (it grossed $325.1 million in North America and $746.8 million worldwide), was considered a major disappointment by many fans. Though Robbie’s Harley Quinn was arguably the most warmly-received member of that ensemble – hence Birds of Prey being greenlit in the first place – there’s no doubt that Suicide Squad left a bad taste in the mouths of many DC devotees, making it entirely possible that any direct spinoff of that film was set up for failure.
As previously noted by Boxoffice’s Shawn Robbins, it could also be the case that the film’s title, Birds of Prey – which only embeds Harley Quinn’s name in the context of a long, cheeky subtitle – affected turnout among prospective audiences who simply weren’t paying all that much attention. Speaking of turnout, the opening weekend audience was almost evenly split between women and men — 51% vs. 49%, respectively — while 65% was over the age of 25 and 38% was over 35.
On the positive side of things, the budget for Birds of Prey was kept relatively low compared to your typical superhero extravaganza, with reports pegging it anywhere from $85 to $100 million. If the film can hold up reasonably well domestically – which is possible if you take into account its current 83% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes (vs. Suicide Squad’s 59%) – and pull in a solid haul overseas, it should finish within the margin of profitability when all is said and done — albeit not at the level the studio originally hoped for.
More to come…
The post Studio Weekend Box Office Report: <em>Birds of Prey</em>, <em>Bad Boys for Life</em>, <em>1917</em> appeared first on Boxoffice.
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