James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has been pinpointed as the movie that could finally shake the Marvel Cinematic Universe out of the stupor it seems to have been stuck in since the beginning of the Multiverse Saga, with the early reactions hinting that it’s set to live up to those expectations.
However, in a potentially worrying sign of things to come, the box office projections for the threequel’s opening weekend have been continually dropping downwards, to the extent that Vol. 3 is in with a real chance of opening lower than not just the derided Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but both of its immediate predecessors.
The most recent numbers are based on pre-sale tickets and thus shouldn’t be taken as concrete fact, but a similar methodology did manage to get a very good handle on how Quantumania fared during its first three days in theaters. Vol. 3 was previously aiming for a debut in the $120-150 million range, but that’s now been drastically revised in some quarters to somewhere between $80 and $105 million, which would be a disaster for Marvel.
You’d think a six-year gap between installments would push the hype levels through the roof, but there’s a very real chance that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 isn’t only going to end up massively under-performing compared to the $146 million launch of its predecessor, but also the $94 million pulled in by the original – which came at a time when the brand and the characters were almost completely unknown to general audiences.
