carrybuh — 1 year ago(December 17, 2024 12:09 PM)

It came in around $10 million under expectations, and those expectations were already low. Sony had hoped it would be a big Christmas hit.
https://www.vulture.com/article/kraven-the-hunters-box-office-failure-superhero-fatigue.html
Opening in more than 3,200 theaters across North America, Kraven the Hunter grossed a lowly $11 million over its first three days, landing at No. 3 among wide-release movies, behind Moana 2 (in its third week out) and Wicked (in its fourth). Not only did that debut significantly undershoot prerelease “tracking” estimates in the $20 million to $25 million range, but it arrives as the worst bow for any film in Sony’s MCU-adjacent Spider-Man Universe — managing to underperform February’s draggy, nepo-heroic Madame Web ($15.3 million) while logging a calamitous 15 percent on the Tomatometer and an abysmal C from CinemaScore. Internationally, Kraven fared even worse, landing in fourth place behind the three-plus-hour Telugu-language action-drama Pushpa: The Rule — Part 2.
But perhaps most ignominious, coming at the tail end of a year in which Joker: Folie à Deux flopped hard and October’s Venom: The Last Dance hit multiplexes as the lowest-grossing film in the six-year-old Venom franchise (taking in $473 million versus the first Venom’s $856 million global haul) — maintaining a negative momentum that began with 2022’s Spider-Man Universe misfire, Morbius — Kraven seemed to confirm one of Hollywood’s worst fears. Namely, that outside of Deadpool & Wolverine’s record-setting $1.3 billion haul this past summer, audiences just don’t seem to turn out for superhero movies anymore. Especially not the Sony-produced anti-hero ones plotted around Spidey villains who are contractually forbidden from referencing the web-slinger in any way. “There used to be a floor for these secondary superhero openings, but these three Spider-Man spinoffs’ audiences are saying, ‘If you don’t give us something reasonably entertaining, we’re not going,’” says David A. Gross, who operates the cinema-consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research. “Morbius, Madame Web, and now Kraven were disliked by both critics and moviegoers. The genre has simply stopped growing.”
Gross places Kraven’s failure to draw box-office first blood within a larger problem for superhero origin stories. “The classics will continue to do well,” he says. “But we haven’t had a successful new character and story in years — since Venom and Aquaman in 2018. Shazam! opened to $53 million in 2019; that’s like a dream number, and it’s not coming back.”