2024 Bad Year for Comic Book Movies! What Happened? Worst Ever?

2024 Bad Year for Comic Book Movies! What Happened? Worst Ever?

The comic book movie genre is one of the most popular movie genres of all time, there’s so many iconic movies of the genre. 2024 hasn’t been the best year for the genre. We’ve gotten six movies in the genre this year and there’s really only been one hit movie, the rest of which either disappointed or flopped at the box office. It’s kind of interesting to talk about, so let’s do it! 

The Comic Book Movies: As previously mentioned, this year we’ve gotten six movies in the genre. I know we still have Kraven the Hunter coming out in December, but I feel like my points here will still stand after that movie comes out. This has been a pretty weak year for comic book movies. Normally going into the year, there’s three comic book movies that I’m very excited about. 2023 it was Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse, and The Flash. This year, it was Deadpool & Wolverine and Joker: Folie A Deux, even that movie I had some skepticisms about. The rest of the movies weren't necessarily ones that I was particularly excited for. They were all kind of tied for #3 through #6 as my most anticipated comic book movies of the year. Now that we’ve gotten ⅚ of those movies, only one of them I liked, you guys know which one that was, Deadpool & Wolverine. I would imagine 95% of the planet would agree that it EASILY the best comic book movie of the year. The other ones with Madame Web, The Crow, Joker: Folie A Deux, and Venom: The Last Dance I would safely go negative on all of those. Normally, I rank the comic book movies at the end of the year, that won’t be happening this year because I don’t know how I would rank them, despite knowing Deadpool & Wolverine would be a clear #1. 

• It’s kind of interesting looking at how much Deadpool & Wolverine surpasses every other comic book movie this year. Deadpool & Wolverine has 78% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is a good score, that is certified fresh but it’s not a fantastic score. The next highest score is Venom: The Last Dance with a 36%, the average Rotten Tomato score for comic book movies this year was 36%. Let’s compare this to last year, which had an average score of 67%. There were nine comic book movies last year, only three of them were rotten. 2022 had an average score of 62%. The last two years had average Rotten Tomato scores that 31% to 26% higher than this year. 

• Even looking at the opening weekend box office, once again Deadpool & Wolverine easily the biggest opening of the genre. There’s nothing even remotely close to it, Deadpool & Wolverine made $211 million in its opening weekend. The second biggest opening weekend is Venom: The Last Dance, we don’t have the official numbers yet. It’s looking to open at about $55 million. Joker: Folie A Deux, a sequel to a $1 billion movie, opened $60 million less than the previous film. The average domestic opening weekend for the genre this year is about $65 million. That’s honestly higher than I thought it was going to be, but because Deadpool & Wolverine opened to over $200 million, this number is dramatically higher. Without that movie, the average would be $28 million, that’s a big difference if you remove one movie. Once again, let’s look at the past years. Where this gets interesting, 2023 had an average opening weekend of $56 million. Which means that 2024 had a bigger average domestic opening, then 2023. But that’s because Deadpool. & Wolverine, made $90 million more in its opening weekend than the biggest opening for a comic book movie of last year. 2023 had more comic book movies coming out, but a lot of them disappointed at the box office. 2022 had an average of $111 million, that’s a fantastic number. That’s dramatically bigger than 2023 or 2024’s numbers. 

• That’s some interesting numbers and comparisons to look at when putting into perspective just how lackluster this year was for comic book movies. These averages will change once Kraven the Hunter comes out, but I don’t think Kraven the Hunter’s numbers either at the box office or critically will dramatically change the averages, if it does it’ll probably go down. Now with all of that information out of the way, I think it’s important to discuss why exactly all of the numbers both critically and financially aren’t the best. 

• REASON #1: Superhero Fatigue: A lot of these reasons are going to tie together, but they’re all different in their own ways. This problem has been going on for a while now, it seemed like it started back in 2023 when Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, that was the last straw that a lot of people had with the MCU. Ever since then, the overall box office numbers for the genre haven’t been great. The only comic book movies that had big opening weekends since Quantumania last February were Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse, and Deadpool & Wolverine. That's because they all got great reviews that people felt were worth their time to go out and see it in the theaters. That shows that people aren’t fatigued about all comic book movies, they’re fatigued about mediocre comic book movies. Like I said earlier, Deadpool & Wolverine was the only comic book movie to be fresh this year. The fact that films like Joker: Folie A Deux and Venom: The Last Dance weren’t getting great reviews, the box office numbers showed that. Perhaps if these movies were better and they got great reviews, I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog post right now. This isn’t an issue that 100% applies to just 2024 comic book movies, I think that hurt 2023’s comic book movies too. But it is something worth discussing that did play a major part in all of this.

• REASON #2: Unnecessary Films: Pretty much every comic book movie this year, besides Deadpool & Wolverine and Venom: The Last Dance people viewed as unnecessary. The other four movies, book movies, were widely viewed as unnecessary for three different reasons. Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter were viewed as unnecessary because the whole idea of the SPUMC universe is terrible. They’re taking all of these Spider-Man villains turning them into anti-heroes, but none of them have ever interacted with Spider-Man. They teased Tom Hardy meeting Tom Holland in Venom: Let There Be Carnage, but that didn’t really go anywhere. People were just rolling their eyes at the idea of getting more movies in this terrible idea for a shared universe. Beyond that, the press tour for Madame Web was awkward. Clearly, Dakota Johnson didn’t want to be promoting this movie, but she had too. There was also just all of this bad buzz surrounding the entire thing, because the audience didn’t want it and the star of the movie didn’t even want it to be a thing. Second, you have Joker: Folie A Deux, a sequel to a $1 billion film. It’s an interesting one because on a business level, I understand why they greenlit a sequel. They’re a business, they want to figure out ways to make more money. So making a sequel to a $1 billion film makes total sense to me. On a story level and where to take Arthur after the events of the first movie, it’s not entirely obvious where a sequel goes. People were very hesitant about it at first, because they wanted to see what the story angle was for this movie. When you add in that it’s a musical, that turns a certain wing of the internet away. The early reviews were making it clear that all of the skeptics about the film were right to have those skepticisms, people just didn’t care so they didn’t even bother watching it. Finally, you have The Crow, a readaptation of the graphic novel. This was a movie that people refused ever since it was announced. The original 1994 movie is beloved and part of that goes back to Brandon Lee who sadly died on the set of that movie. That’s what he’s known for, the role that he’s known for is the role that he wasn’t able to see the final product of. People denied it because it was Brandon Lee’s legacy and its thing. People viewed the movie as a cash grab from Lionsgate, it wasn’t even successful at that. When the reviews for the movie came out and they were terrible, all of the people that weren’t interested in this movie became less interested because they heard terrible things. It’s fascinating that for three totally different reasons, four comic book movies this year were viewed as unnecessary and pointless.

• REASON #3: The Strikes: I don’t think this necessarily affected these movies, but because of the strikes so many 2024 movies were delayed to 2025, including some big comic book movies. Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts* were both meant to release in 2024, but because of the strikes they got delayed. Obviously, we haven’t seen the movies yet but if they’re good and they are released in 2024 suddenly I might not be writing this. Even though Kraven the Hunter was supposed to release in October 2023, they released the first trailer for this movie in June 2023. But when the actors' strikes happened, they delayed the movie because Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Russell Crowe couldn’t go out and promote the movie, so they delayed the film to August 2024 then to December 2024. If the strikes never happened, we already would have gotten Kraven the Hunter a year ago. We would have gotten three MCU movies, suddenly there’s ways in which this year of comic book movies could have been better if the strikes never happened. I believe at one point, Madame Web was supposed to release in 2023 but because of a number of delays due to reshoots, it got delayed to February 2024.