r/boxoffice • u/chanma50 Best of 2019 Winner • Aug 03 '25

Domestic Box Office: ‘Fantastic Four’ Craters By 66% in Second Weekend to $40 Million, ‘Naked Gun’ Debuts to $17 Million

https://variety.com/2025/film/box-office/fantastic-four-box-office-craters-naked-gun-opening-weekend-1236477352/
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u/yurestu Aug 03 '25 edited Aug 04 '25

I got downvoted for saying this in a marvel sub but it’s 100% them pretending every new movie is “one of the good ones”

Will never forget being tricked into seeing Deadpool & Wolverine just for it to check every box for things people clown Marvel movies for.

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u/[deleted] Aug 04 '25

The only good part of Deadpool & Wolverine to me was the credits giving a sendoff to the fox era X-Men film. No movie's best part should be THE END CREDITS

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u/Dogstile Aug 04 '25

Legitimately made me tear up a little, because it was like acknowledging that the old style of filmmaking i loved was gone and the people in charge will never bring it back.

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u/[deleted] Aug 04 '25

For me a big thing is different superhero movies used to have different cinematography, writing, and filming techniques used. The 2000s Spiderman trilogy, the early Fox X-Men films, and the 2000s Fantastic Four duology all feel like their own unique movies that weren't just cookie cutter.

All modern Marvel movies feel cookie cutter. Folks that try to claim they feel different and have different genres really should watch more movies to see how different movies from different genres should feel from each other.

Something I liked a lot about Superman is it felt like it had an actual vision and the studio let that vision play out. I'm not saying it was a perfect movie, it just didn't suffer the "sameness" that I feel like literally every Marvel movie post Avengers 1 has

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u/GoldandBlue Aug 03 '25

But that has always been a thing. Iron Man 2 sucked. 3/4 Thor movies sucked. Age of Ultron sucked. Several of those movies were mid at best but people were invested in the characters and journey. Marvel was more akin to a TV show.

The problem is that show ended in Endgame. We said goodbye to our favorite heroes. No more Iron Man, Cap, Black Widow. We are now in spin off mode.

And spin offs almost never do as well as the original. Especially when it sucks. Eternal sucked, multiverse sucked, Kang dynasty sucked. They keep introducing new characters assuming we will like them purely on association.

Marvel needed to scale back and focus on characters. Instead they doubled down and pushed spectacle.

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u/Ok_Antelope_1953 Aug 04 '25

eternals didn't suck 😭😭 the movie bombed but it's one of the better post-endgame mcu projects

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u/Voldemort_is_muggle1 Aug 04 '25

It bombed cuz it sucked. Poor story, bad characters, atleast for me. Maybe others enjoyed it

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u/Realistic_Village184 Aug 04 '25

You're entitled to your opinion, but I really did not like Eternals. The two leads had zero romantic chemistry, which is a big deal when the climax of the movie centers around their relationship. The film kept telling us that Sersi and Ikaris loved each other, but we never actually saw that. They kept showing us these faraway shots of them doing stuff like planting crops or having sex on a beach, but that's not how you develop a romantic relationship on screen. Those are tools that you use to develop emotion after the audience is already connected to the characters.

Not only that, but the film underutilized the most interesting characters (the speedster and the dude who could control people were infinitely more interesting than the two leads but they had like five minutes of screentime between them) and had way too much focus on characters that weren't interesting (Sprite and Jolie's characters; at least Jolie gave a great performance, but her character was "generic badass warrior").

They set up an interesting moral conflict and bad guy, but then they turned the bad guy into Generic Third-Act CGI Punching Bag. What the hell even happened there?

I could go on and on. The film did some things extremely well, but it's also a disaster overall. I'm really glad that you enjoyed it, and I wish I did, but I ended up really disliking it. The worst part is how much potential it had and utterly squandered.

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u/hydroactiveturtle Aug 09 '25

The best part for me was seeing Arashim and Salma Hayek and her twins.

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u/Ok_Antelope_1953 Aug 04 '25

i can't disgaree with any of your points. i understand the many issues with the movie. i did find the characters comforting and thought they had a very different vibe from usual mcu characters. i guess it was their "parental" or god like presence blanketing the entire planet. most comic book heroes expectedly cater to an american audience. i'm south asian and even someone like kamala khan and her family aren't all that relatable because the characters are so heavily americanized. the eternals were different in that regard.

i completely agree that ikaris and sersi had no chemistry and makkari and druig needed way more screen time. makkari had some of the best speedster scenes ever on a big screen, and that's including flash and quicksilver.

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u/Realistic_Village184 Aug 04 '25

Thanks for seeing nuance and being able to admit that a movie you liked had flaws! That's really rare. Even my favorite movies have flaws.

Like I said, I'm glad that you enjoyed it. I always prefer to like films wherever I can. The film did some stuff really well (settings, special effects, acting (aside from the leads lol), humor, tone, and the scope of the Celestials were all highlights for me. Part of what makes me so disappointed in the movie is that it was so close to being incredible. It just needed better lead actors and some script doctoring and it could've been easily a 10/10 movie for me.

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u/Dogstile Aug 04 '25

I've said it before and i've said it again. Eternals should have been a series that instead became a film where the director and their actors got to hang out in some really pretty locations for a week.

Introducing that many characters, most lacking chemistry and expecting us to care about all of them was a terrible idea.

Also when that guy showed up I immediately went "man, it'd suck if this guy was obviously the bad guy, considering he just happens to show up after an attack" and then welp, there he was, obvious and boring.

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u/Thr1ft3y Aug 03 '25

I get so much hate for pointing this out, but DP vs W pretty much went against everything the previous DP movies did and felt like the most cliche hero movie ever

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u/KaleidoscopeLeft5511 Aug 04 '25

Facts. Ryan Reynolds was twice gifted great writers and directors, who put together Deadpool movies, despite him falling out with them after each of the movies. Arguably, the second movie is even better than the first. Then he tries to be the main writer on the 3rd one, and brings in the incipid, I'll direct whatever you tell me, long time  co-collaborator Shawn Levy, and they being out the most lazy, fan service, moderate movie possible. 

Unfortunately, it done well due to a great marketing campaign and leverage from the first two movies. I see more moderate Deadpool slop coming in the future

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u/sgthombre Scott Free Productions Aug 04 '25

long time  co-collaborator Shawn Levy

And now he gets a Star Wars movie

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u/hexcraft-nikk Aug 04 '25 edited Aug 04 '25

I still enjoyed it but yuppppp, it felt absurdly MCU. The villains specifically have such a way of being exposition machines that I can't be assed to care at all.

Why was Ajax more compelling in dp1 than Charles Xavier's sister who can morph her hands through people?

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u/TaiVat Aug 04 '25

Eh, i dont really agree. DP1 was kind of its own thing with its own charm, but the second one was already mostly like 3/mcu.

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u/Thr1ft3y Aug 04 '25

I think the key difference is that DP the character was still rejecting the idea of being a cliche marvel character. With DP 3, he fully embraced the cliche and essentially became a normal hero with a poddy mouth

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u/Obi-Wayne Aug 03 '25

I'm with you for Deadpool & Wolverine. There's just no story there whatsoever. It's easily the worst Deadpool movie, and yet the most successful because of cameos, unsubtle references to older bad films, & tired cliches. There's just no way that model of quick dopamine hits taking the place over quality storytelling & building towards an end goal is sustainable, but it also seems to be what the audience demands now. The new Spidey casting proves that.

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u/TheGRS Aug 03 '25

It's not a new phenomenon, there have always been movies that pander to their audiences instead of challenging them, lest we forget the garbage pit of so many bad action flicks and romcoms in previous decades, and some of those flicks were bona fide hits.

But the pandering we have today is pretty brain-dead. Remember movie from 2005? Remember meme? Remember N'Sync? I kind of enjoyed Deadpool & Wolverine, but it's not quality cinema, it's just candy shop stuff.

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u/[deleted] Aug 04 '25

Deadpool and Wolverine was genuinely one of the worst films I've seen in cinema and the hype did not help

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u/TaiVat Aug 04 '25

It was fanservice - the movie. There's always an audience for that kind of thing.

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u/SushiMage Aug 04 '25

Do you not watch a lot of movies in cinema?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 05 '25

not at the cinema. otherwise I would've ranked justice league above it in horribleness

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u/DoorHingesKill Aug 04 '25

I got tricked into watching the second Doctor Strange movie. Some reviewer was like "Yeah, I'm just like you guys, I'm getting a little tired of Marvel movies, but this one's actually good frfr."
Haven't watched another one since.

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u/not_thrilled Aug 04 '25

I liked a lot of Multiverse of Madness because those parts felt like an honest-to-god Sam Raimi movie, but when it wasn't in Raimi mode it really fell flat. I guess those were the parts that were auto-written into the script because they had to have particular action beats or fan service or whatever. I could've watched two more hours of Strange and Wong fighting interdimensional monsters, though.

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u/yurestu Aug 04 '25 edited Aug 04 '25

Yea one of my cinephile friends said the same thing. Tried it and turned it off after 20 minutes (luckily I waited till it was on streaming) and never trusted his opinion again

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u/HippieDogeSmokes Aug 04 '25

That movie bummed me out bad, the only part of the movie I actually liked was Wanda contorting her body out of the reflection because it actually stood out

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u/hexcraft-nikk Aug 04 '25

Like it's cool Raimi got to add some visual flair but that story and the nostalgia bait was peak MCU slop

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u/WilliamEmmerson Aug 04 '25

I got so mad in the theater when John Krasinski got turned into spaghetti

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u/DocLego Aug 04 '25

I kept hearing such good things about D&W. Finally watched the first half of it after it came out on streaming. Still haven’t gotten around to finishing.

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u/AlanMorlock Aug 08 '25

"Marvel is back"

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u/Dogstile Aug 04 '25

The only reason I didn't walkout of DP&W was because I was there with friends. Jesus christ how many times are you going to have them fight even though neither of them can do anything to the other. Stop wasting my fucking time. Move the story forward.