Last week, projections for the opening weekend of Marvel Studios’ “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” were high – somewhere in the range of around $280 million worldwide.
Domestically the film has performed a bit above expectations with $104 million over the three-day and on target to earn around $118-120 million over the four-day holiday weekend.
Internationally though the film is coming in soft compared to those overly rosy projections – the worldwide estimate has been revised down to $225 million with international counting for around $121 million of that.
So why the shortfall? Much of it seems to be attributable to China where the film’s opening weekend came in with a poor $19.4 million start – less than one-third of the $68.2 million which “Ant-Man and the Wasp” earned in China on its opening weekend in August 2018.
It’s also considerably less than the $55 million opening weekend projections made for China early last week.
Whilst “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” was the first post-Endgame Marvel film to get a release in the Middle Kingdom, it came months after the film had been released everywhere else and so it made very little.
‘Quantumania’ on the other hand was launched in China day-and-date with the rest of the world, and at a time when Chinese-made Lunar New Year titles are tapering off. Thus it begs the question – can the MCU ever claw back to box-office success in China like in the past?
Source: Deadline
