Blue Beetle Finally Unseats Barbie While Making DC History
You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and then you have…the Blue Beetle? According to The Hollywood Reporter, the DCEU’s swansong managed to do with one teenage hero what Nickelodeon couldn’t do with four—dethrone Barbie as the queen of the box office. However, the Latino-centric film unfortunately also had the weakest opening in the entire DCEU.
Blue Beetle took the #1 box office position away from Barbie this week, but the film remains one of DC’s least profitable premieres.
So, did Blue Beetle have a good weekend or a bad weekend? It honestly depends on what metric you measure by. From a purely financial standpoint, the movie didn’t do so hot, earning only $25.4 million domestically and another $18 million overseas for a global total of only $43.4 million. Even conservative projections had the movie coming in closer to $32 million domestically.
By comparison, The Flash, one of the biggest box office flops of all time, managed to earn $55 million domestically on its opening weekend. If that’s not bad enough, Flash‘s worldwide opening total was $130 million, almost three times what Blue Beetle took in globally!
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, are easily in the Top 10 most recognizable brands on earth and still couldn’t defeat Barbie, meaning that there just might be something to this Blue Beetle fella, after all.
On the other hand, if you judge Blue Beetle on popularity, well, it was the #1 movie this weekend, ending Barbie‘s month-long stranglehold on the top spot at the box office. That’s especially impressive when you consider that the Blue Beetle is a relatively obscure IP.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, are easily in the Top 10 most recognizable brands on earth and still couldn’t defeat Barbie, meaning that there just might be something to this Blue Beetle fella, after all.
Another area where Blue Beetle crushed it was getting Latinos into the theater. Exit polling showed that roughly 39 percent of ticket buyers were Hispanic or Latino, a demographic that typically makes up closer to 30 percent of the moviegoing audience. The movie, with its almost exclusively Latino cast and crew, proves once again that representation matters in media.
It isn’t exactly fair to compare Blue Beetle to The Flash, either. For one thing, Blue Beetle‘s poor performance had nothing to do with the toxic behavior of any of its stars. For another thing, Blue Beetle has outside forces working against it in ways The Flash never had to contend with.
Strikes And Hurricane’s Effect On Blue Beetle At The Box Office
The ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike meant that the cast of Blue Beetle wasn’t able to do promotion for the movie via late-night appearances, interviews, or any of the myriad ways modern movies sell themselves, like forcing the cast to blow out their larynxes while eating ridiculously hot chicken wings.
California is also currently at the mercy of Tropical Storm Hilary—a weather phenomenon usually confined to the East Coast—which also negatively affected box office grosses. Any way you slice it between relative obscurity, the strikes, and the weather, Blue Beetle was fighting an uphill battle.
The fact that enough people chose it over all the other options out there—including Strays, the R-rated talking dog comedy starring Will Ferrell that also opened this weekend—to make the movie #1 should be seen as a triumph no matter what.
When it comes to Blue Beetle, Warner Bros doesn’t need to panic just yet. The movie’s second weekend will give us a better indication of whether it has legs or not. Even if the movie drops off significantly in its second weekend, it can still boast that for one perfect weekend, it got to be #1 at the box office. It’s more than Strays will ever have.
