Sorry Shang-Chi, for pronouncing it Shang-Chi instead of Shang-Chi.
Shang-Chi isn’t off to a great start. I wish that weren’t the case, but as I said on the show, it is what it is. There are no “great” options right now, and Disney is opting to go theater-only for the rest of 2021. I’m sure the Black Widow lawsuit has something to do with that, since they haven’t been sued for delaying movies that I am aware of yet.
Theaters are hurting, but you can’t force people to go to the movies. You can encourage them with big releases, and the theaters themselves can do whatever they can to make people feel comfortable. But at showtime it is up to the people to decide if they are going to show up, and they aren’t. Shang-Chi breaking the record for movies opening on Labor Day says more about the other movies than it does itself.
Looking at the domestic, opening weekend numbers in the MCU Shang-Chi falls short of every single MCU origin story except for Ant-Man and The Incredible Hulk. Even the progenitor Iron Man, when the MCU didn’t even exist and the movie was mostly ad-libbed comes out ahead.
This isn’t to say the Shang-Chi is a bad movie. I definitely recommend you see it when you can! But as far as seeing it on the big screen? I seems like people would rather wait.
That being said, in my research for this post I found I may have been a bit harsh on recent releases and the second week fall. Most of the Marvel movies that have been released, regardless of when they came out or even what country you are looking at have similar numbers. I found that a bit surprising, even for juggernauts like Endgame (which felt like it was selling out showings for months) follow the same trend.
The numbers for Shang-Chi still aren’t great, especially since the MCU has a well-established fan base at this point and there is very little for cinematic competition out there right now. If the pandemic didn’t exist and everything else movie-wise was the same I would be expecting it to be lighting up the box offices, but instead it is doing simply “OK”.
As promised, here is the poll for our pick for the next MCU TV team-up! Place your own vote, or make a different prediction down below!
Regarding video game TV series, there is also a show on Netflix based on the multi-player arena battle game DOTA. And while most people’s first thought for a video game to make a show or movie out of would probably be an RPG title, games like Twisted Metal and DOTA are probably more likely to result in a good movie adaptation. A series or movie based on an rpg game would pretty much have to include or at least reference the story of the original game, whereas games from other genres just provide a setting and a cast of quirky characters and then the writers can make up whatever story they want without alienating the original fanbase.
Thank you for the feedback, and I think you are correct on this! A good example of this is Final Fantasy – Spirits Within. I actually liked that movie a lot, it kept the familiar themes of a planetary lifeforce and an interstellar invader colliding. But when I was walking out of the theater I remember hearing a lot of people complaining, because what they wanted was Final Fantasy 7 – The Movie (which we kinda eventually got with Advent Children) and not a new story based in the FF universe. Much like creating movies based on comic books, the richer the existing story content the less you will be able to stray from it without upsetting a significant portion of the existing fanbase. Using a “thin” video game as a placesetting and expanding the lore with a fresh story can make for an entertaining movie (like Rampage) as long as they don’t try too hard to forcefully remind us the source material comes from an existing video game (like Doom).