The summer movie season is typically filled with box office successes and fan-favorite films, but 2023 has been a rough year so far. Despite a crowded slate of highly-anticipated films, including promising indie features and franchise tentpoles, the summer movie season has been filled with endless financial flops.
While the summer of 2023 has included the occasional success story, the vast majority of films therein have underperformed at the box office. From mixed bags like Fast X to unmitigated failures like The Flash, there are several major reasons that so many summer movies are flopping at the box office.
8 Films Overpromise And Underdeliver
A problem that faces many projects in 2023's summer movie season, including many modern superhero movies, is that they overpromise in their marketing and underdeliver in their execution. While it has always been marketing's job to hype up a movie prior to its release, sometimes trailers and promos can promise too much and thereby leave audiences disappointed upon seeing the actual film.
Films like The Flash struggled greatly from this pitfall. The Flash was the subject of a months-long campaign that included countless celebrities, including James Gunn, Tom Cruise, Stephen King, and even Edgar Wright, publicly raving about the film after early screenings. Some reports even claimed that The Flash would be just as warmly-received as Christopher Nolan's beloved Dark Knight trilogy. By setting such high and unreachable expectations, Warner Bros. essentially guaranteed that audiences would be underwhelmed by the final product, losing interest in the film in the weeks after its release and driving down its box office numbers.
7 Behind-The-Scenes Controversy
2023 has been a turbulent year for Hollywood in general, as studios continue trying to sell their films despite several behind-the-scenes controversies working against them. In summer alone, Hollywood has seen both the Writers and Actors Guilds strike for fair wages, whereas other films, like The Flash, have featured controversial lead actors like Ezra Miller.
Although behind-the-scenes controversies don't always have a negative effect on the film itself, they can affect general audiences' level of excitement. Some potential viewers may be turned off by Hollywood's constant struggles and decide not to support certain films or filmmakers as a result. This could serve as a potential explanation for The Flash's abysmal box office run, with the Ezra Miller-led film set to become one of the biggest box office bombs in history despite starring several of the most popular characters of all time.
6 Poor Marketing
Unfortunately, many box office flops are great films that simply didn't market themselves correctly. If a studio fails to get the word out about its upcoming projects, audiences may not discover a film in time to support it in theaters. Moreover, if audiences only see one or two trailers for an upcoming film, the limited promotional material may not be enough to pique their interest.
The summer's worst example of marketing is Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken. The film received the sparsest of marketing from Universal Pictures, releasing only a handful of trailers in the weeks leading up to its debut. The studio seemingly expected to coast on the popularity of Disney's The Little Mermaid, which Ruby Gillman parodies. However, Universal clearly overestimated audiences' enthusiasm for The Little Mermaid, with their counterprogramming release drowning within its first few weeks.
5 COVID-19 Holdouts
The biggest problem facing movies in the last several years has been the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. 2020 saw most theaters shut down entirely as new films were continually delayed further and further back in the year. Even after theaters reopened, audiences were slow to to go out to theaters in the months that followed. While audiences have been slowly returning to theatergoing, there is still a long road ahead to the movie industry's recovery.
In the years since COVID, major franchises like the MCU and Avatar have slowly helped get out to theaters once more. Nevertheless, smaller films have proven to have a harder time convincing viewers to do the same. As a result, films like Joy Ride or No Hard Feelings, which could have been surprise summer hits in the 2010s, are forced to settle for respectable but ultimately underwhelming box office hauls.
4 Poor Reviews
Although the summer movie season has seen occasional box office successes like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, many of the films that were projected to be massive hits have ultimately fallen short upon their release. In some cases, audience excitement for a particular film has been driven down by poor or mediocre critical reviews.
Even major tentpole releases like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny aren't immune to this year's failing summer movie season. Dial of Destiny was one of the most highly anticipated films of the year but, after a lukewarm reception at the Cannes Film Festival, box office projections for the legacy sequel began to decrease. While later reviews skewed more positively, Dial of Destiny suffered in its early weeks at the box office, even struggling to keep up with independent films like Sound of Freedom.
3 Audiences Are Feeling Franchise Fatigue
In a cinema landscape overwrought with ongoing series and cinematic universes, it is no surprise that audiences are beginning to feel franchise fatigue. Most of the biggest movies released this summer were either a sequel to a long-running franchise or otherwise connected to a larger cinematic universe. In some cases, these tentpole installments failed to live up to box office expectations because audiences are simply growing tired.
Franchise fatigue is especially evident in a series like Fast and Furious, which unnecessarily split its finale into multiple parts. While the recently released Fast X has had a respectable overseas haul, the film categorically flopped in the domestic market, where it only outearned the original three entries in the franchise (via The Numbers). Looking at the numbers, it is clear that certain franchises are on their last legs and would do well to bring things to a speedy conclusion before their following entries turn out to be box-office embarrassments.
2 Shortened Streaming Release Windows
Studios created a massive problem for themselves when it comes to releasing new movies on streaming platforms. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, audiences have been trained to expect certain movies to debut on streaming only a few weeks after their theatrical release. Knowing that they can watch the film at home for no additional cost in a matter of weeks, audiences are less inclined to turn out for specific films in theaters.
The clearest example of this unfortunate trend is Pixar Animation. Once the undisputed leading figure in animation, Pixar's last several releases, including this year's Elemental, have been underwhelming at the box office. After a string of Disney+ exclusive releases, including Turning Red and Soul, Disney trained audiences to think of Pixar as a straight-to-streaming studio. Since then, all of Pixar's theatrical offerings have failed at the box office, including the highly anticipated Lightyear.
1 Overinflated Budgets
The biggest reason that 2023's summer movies have mostly been considered financial failures at the box office actually has very little to do with audience excitement, critical reviews, or even behind-the-scenes controversy. In fact, most of this summer's flops can be attributed to each film's bloated, over-the-top budget.
Whether this summer's massive budgets are a new trend or merely a manifestation of increased COVID-19 protocols on movie sets, they clearly are not sustainable. The Little Mermaid, for example, would have been considered far more profitable with its $547 million haul if it hadn't cost $250 million in production cost alone (via The Numbers). Since films generally spend the same amount on marketing as they do production, The Little Mermaid may have needed $500 million just to break even, making it barely profitable in the theatrical window. With other films sporting budgets in the range of $300 million, studios are setting up their summer movies to flop merely because they need to make so much more just to break even.