Despite being well-reviewed, James Gunn’s “The Suicide Squad” is officially DOA at the box-office — dropping a whopping 81% in its second week. As it stands, its paltry $42 million cumulative gross will make it very hard to break even. The film has a massive budget of $200 million budget. Yikes.
Meanwhile, “experts” are calling “Free Guy” a hit. The Ryan Reynolds video-game romcom snagged a comfy $28.4 million in its first four days. The worldwide total thus far is $50 million. Not bad, right?. For Reynolds this should wipe away the stink of “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard,” but then you realize that “Free Guy” has a massive budget of $125 million. What the hey?! It’ll need to have some legs to break even before it inevitably goes to Disney+ in the fall. A second week drop of max 50% is required next week for the film to be sustainable.
The current box office underperformance is naturally scaring all these big budget films. Just last week Tom Hardy’s Venom sequel got pushed back by a month. The delta variant is freaking studio heads and audiences. Theaters probably won't close again, but they're definitely going to struggle without these blockbusters in the month ahead.
It’s almost guaranteed that there will be a fourth wave, but the real question this time around is will theatres close again? I don’t think they will, especially if they only let fully vaccinated people buy tickets, but I can definitely see millions of Americans avoiding cinemas as a whole due to their fear of the virus and the number of cases exponentially growing by the week .. we’re already seeing that happen.
The delta spike in the U.S. is expected to peak in October.