Endgame and the future of the box office
If you, like thousands of other South Africans, were finding it hard to get tickets for Avengers: Endgame the finale to an 11-year journey, 22-film road for a particular moment in the everexpanding Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) then you were not alone.
The three-hour long, final episode of MCU’s multicharacter, multibillion-dollar earning franchise smashed box office records around the globe for its opening weekend. In SA alone, the film earned a recordbreaking R34m on its opening weekend and globally it enjoyed a $1.2bn opening.
In an age when it seems as if cinema audiences are drastically shrinking thanks to streaming platforms and peak TV, Disney’s MCU monster has proved that for a particular type of film there is a very profitable future. In China the film made an unprecedented $330m for its opening weekend, setting it on course to challenge the current world record holder, James Cameron’s Avatar, which made $2.7bn globally on its release a decade ago.
However, while Endgame is making many record profits for Disney, it needs to be seen in the light of a dedicated and ferociously committed fanboy MCU audience who have helped the series to become a box-office phenomenon over the last decade.
You can judge the payingpower of this audience by their furious, and sometimes violent, response to those idiots who dare try to spoil the films for other viewers by tweeting salient plot-points online.
NFL player LeSean McCoy tweeted the ending of Endgame last weekend and was met by
calls for his transfer and firing from angry fans around the world. In Hong Kong, a facetious moviegoer who walked out of the film and loudly announced spoilers to awaiting viewers was beaten to within an inch of his life. You may mess with the fictional characters in the films but you don’t mess with reallife MCU fans.
Previous box-office record holders have earned their place by virtue of their stature as cultural milestones, as Atlantic film critic David Sims has pointed out: Avatar for its pioneering of the then new capabilities of 3-D technology,
Titanic as a word-of-mouth sensation, Jurassic Park for its early demonstration of the wonders of CGI, and Star Wars and Jaws as early evidence of the possibilities of the blockbuster as a new genre.
But Avengers: Endgame represents something else entirely: “Overwhelming audience loyalty to an entire brand, a 22-film series reaching a satisfyingly undeniable conclusion.”
What that means for the future of mainstream cinema is still slightly uncertain but you can be assured that it won’t mean an increase in original product. Disney will be banking hard on the 2019 Star Wars instalment, Warner Brothers is putting everything it has behind its next DC comics outing The
Joker and Universal studios are hoping that its Fast & Furious spinoff Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw will deliver them a huge payload in August.
While the streaming world may be the only vestige left for filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese (Netflix) and Steven Spielberg (Apple), the cinematic multiplex world seems firmly in the hands of Disney and the blockbuster comics franchise.