‘Shang-Chi’ Succeeded Where ‘Tenet’ Failed (Box Office)

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings grossed $1.9 million on Tuesday to bring its 19-day domestic cume to $180.344 million. That Tuesday gross is +26% from yesterday (cheap ticket Tuesday strikes again) and -39% from last Tuesday. The film will pass Ant-Man ($180 million in 2015) and Thor ($181 million) sometime today as it pushes past Black Widow ($183.4 million) tomorrow to become the year’s biggest domestic grosser. This will likely be the fourth and final weekend during which Shang-Chi tops the box office. It’ll be the first film to place first at the weekend box office four times in a row since Chris Nolan’s Tenet. That sci-fi actioner placed first for the first five weekends, partially because the promised post-Tenet tentpoles never arrived.

That Destin Daniel Cretton’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings might get displaced either this weekend by Dear Evan Hansen or certainly next weekend by Venom: Let There Be Carnage is an ironic case of a blockbuster being successful enough to essentially create its own competition. Venom: Let There Be Carnage moved from October 15 to October 1 (after initially dating itself on September 24) because Shang-Chi performed so well over Labor Day that the post-Suicide Squad panic subsided. This time last year, the industry was reeling from the domestic underperformance of the John David Washington/Robert Pattinson time-inversion flick. Or, more accurately, they were reeling from NYC and LA theaters remaining closed and the promised flood of late-2020 tentpoles being delayed into 2021.

Tenet was supposed to be the big blockbuster that would welcome re-opening theaters with open arms and whose success would be followed by the likes of Wonder Woman 1984 and Halloween Kills in October, Black Widow and No Time to Die in November and West Side Story and Dune in December. With the mere $58 million domestic cume (ironically still an unadjusted record for a Labor Day release) sticking out more than the still-aspirational (by pandemic-era standards) $305 million overseas total, and with major theaters in major markets remaining shuttered, the great rescue of late-2020 didn’t happen. Regal shut down entirely until April of 2021, and WB announced that it would put all of its 2021 releases both in theaters and on HBO Max.

To be fair, Tenet was never intended to be the theatrical savior. In a typical summer (surrounded by conventional franchise fare like F9, Black Widow and Ghostbusters: Afterlife), it was supposed to be the big-budget “counterprogramming for adults” blockbuster option. Once again, whatever my issues with the movie (and, once again, subtitles would have helped), the film earned more overseas than any other Hollywood movie save for F9 ($541 million including $216 million in China) since late 2019. Without getting into the moral implications, I wonder what would have happened if LA and New York theaters had opened in September, Tenet had crawled to $100 million domestic and the year-end 2020 slate arrived as scheduled. Now there’s a “What If?” I’d like to see.

The opposite happened with Shang-Chi. It was the first unmitigated Labor Day weekend smash in recorded box office history, out-grossing (via a $94.5 million Fri-Mon debut) the inflation-adjusted domestic cumes of Dead Again and Rob Zombie’s Halloween on the first weekend. It sent a message that the free-falling performance of The Suicide Squad (a film that, quality and acclaim notwithstanding, was always a commercial coin toss), the softer-than-hoped run for Jungle Cruise ($200 million worldwide but on a $200 million budget) and the failure of Snake Eyes ($38 million/$88 million) wasn’t a message for everyone else to flee. A well-liked (and quite good) MCU blockbuster earning around 85% of what it arguably would have made in non-Covid times was a sign that the water was safe(r).  

Yes, Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick moved from November to May of next year, while Sony sold Hotel Transylvania: Transformania to Amazon for around $100 million (even as it slotted Ghostbusters: Afterlife in Top Gun’s vacated November 19 slot). However, No Time to Die is finally opening as planned overseas next weekend. Venom: Let There Be Carnage is opening globally next weekend too. Meanwhile, Legendary and WB’s Dune opened overseas last weekend to a better-than-hoped $38 million debut. Disney announced that Encanto, West Side Story and Eternals would be getting 30-45 days of theatrical exclusivity, putting a temporary (?) stop to their day-and-date Disney+ Premier Access program. If these films perform somewhat well, we could see an end to the non-stop release date musical chairs.

Tenet’s soft domestic performance (along with, concurrently, the continued closure of theaters in key/major marketplaces) led to a slew of delays for what was supposed to be the next batch of tentpoles. Likewise, a poor performance from the Simu Liu/Awkwafina/Tony Leung/Michelle Yeoh actioner, even on the heels of Free Guy’s solid $300 million-plus run, would have indeed been seen as proof that this October’s batch of biggies (and beyond) would have to vacate for later theatrical releases (or some other form of non-theatrical distribution). But the Disney/Marvel movie came through, existing as the right movie at the right time and almost singlehandedly preventing a deluge of delays and/or altered releases. Tenet tried to be that hero last year, but Shang-Chi did just that a year later.