The MCU just broke a 15-year tradition, and now all of cinema is suffering more than it has in 3 decades

You know who didn’t have a good Memorial Day weekend this year? Warner Bros. and Sony execs, that’s who, after the historically low box office haul brought in over the last weekend of May 2024. And it’s all Marvel‘s fault.

Two major releases dropped into theaters in the run-up to Memorial Day on Monday, May 27 — Furiosa, the long-awaited prequel to 2015’s mega-successful Max Max: Fury Road, and The Garfield Movie, Chris Pratt’s latest animated outing based on an iconic character after The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the second highest-grossing film of 2023. WB must’ve been expecting big things from Furiosa while Sony no doubt thought they could sit back and eat Lasagna while Garfield brought in the dough.

Unfortunately, both movies spectacularly failed to even earn $100 million between them. Furiosa fell far short of expectations, opening to just $32 million, a much slimmer debut than Fury Road‘s own $45 million (which didn’t even have the boost of a holiday weekend behind it). Likewise, Garfield came in slightly under at $31.1 million, meaning it has no chance of recapturing the magic of the Super Mario Bros. from last year.

All in all, the dual disappointment means that 2024 marks the lowest-grossing Memorial Day weekend since 1995 — excluding 2020 when theaters weren’t even open, of course. Don’t lay the blame solely on Furiosa and Garfield’s doormats, though, as the main culprit for this cinematic calamity is arguably the MCU.

The MCU just failed to kick off summer the right way for the first time since 2009

It’s not just Furiosa and Garfield that are struggling to fill seats, however, as even Barbie‘s own Ryan Gosling couldn’t convince enough people to go see The Fall Guy to prevent it from flopping earlier in May. So why are ticket sales slipping across the board? Maybe that’s something to do with the fact that this is the first year since 2009 that Marvel Studios hasn’t released a movie to get the summer cinema season going.

Again excluding 2020, the MCU has offered up a major May release every single year since the 2010s began… Until now. Thanks to the 2023 strikes massively holding up the studio’s slate of projects, Marvel only has the one movie coming out this year, that being this July’s Deadpool & Wolverine. Even in recent years, when Marvel Fever has cooled, the franchise’s May movies have earned big bucks — see 2022’s Doctor Strange 2 ($955 million) and 2023’s Guardians of the Galaxy 3 ($845 million).

Next year should be business of usual, thankfully, with Thunderbolts* scheduled for May 5, 2024, so with any luck this Memorial Day disaster will turn out to be a one-off. Maybe it’s not fair to say the MCU carries cinema on its back anymore, like in the 2010s, but clearly the box office still needs it to give it a boost.