Why Blue Beetle's Box Office Shouldn't Matter To You

Yep, it’s time for another rant about the stupidity of box office arguments. Like we haven’t had enough of those already this year.

2023 hasn’t been a great year for comic book movie ticket sales, and contrary to what the trolls on The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter will tell you, both DC AND Marvel movies have been affected. Even the success of Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 is clouded by the fact it made $18.3 million less in worldwide box office than its predecessor, GOTGV2.

Have DC movies had a much worse year overall at the box office? Sure, but you have no logical reasons to care as a fan at this point. Even your original argument for why box office matters to fandoms is out the window with DC movies in 2023, because every release date is just another stop on the DC Extended Universe Farewell Tour.

Admittedly though, it’s a bit different with Blue Beetle……because you should care about its box office even less than Shazam: Fury of the Gods or The Flash.

Plenty of you are likely thinking that position makes no sense at all, considering that of all the final DCEU movies in 2023, the one that James Gunn has specifically touted as having a place in his new DCU, is Blue Beetle, and it’s easy to speculate that a poor box office showing for his first film would force Gunn to change his mind. Maybe. Maybe not?

Fortunately, the reasons you shouldn’t care at all about Blue Beetle’s box office go beyond whether or not he will be featured in the new DC cinematic plan, so let’s table that for a bit and go over some more important ones first:

1 - REPRESENTATION MATTERS

This really should be the only reason on this list, but it’s at least the most important one. In 2018, black people across the planet basked in the glow of finally having a comic book film of our own to hail our own cultural roots and display the vibrancy of our people in a fictionalized badassery sense with Black Panther. The fact that it made $1.3 billion for Marvel Studios was just a bonus, seriously. The fact that it exists, coupled with how it captured the cultural zeitgeist at the time with the late, great Chadwick Boseman at the center of it, is something they can never take away from black people, no matter how hard they might try. It exists, it’s real, and it’s a cultural landmark.

In 2021, Asian culture got its own culturally relevant fictional badassery with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which again, no matter what anyone tries to tell you, it exists, it’s real, and it’s a cultural landmark.

In 2022, Middle Eastern culture took center stage in the comic book movie realm with Black Adam, and while so many focus heavily on The Rock and the Henry Cavill situation as well as the box office, that movie still exists for any Middle Eastern comic book fan to enjoy as a landmark for their own culture.

And now in 2023, Latino culture has emerged front and center with Blue Beetle, giving yet another BIPOC group their own cultural landmark in the comic book movie genre. No matter how much or how little the movie makes theatrically, it’s now part of the group. There is no erasing it, forgetting it or even dismissing it, because Latinos are officially seated at the table with their own fictionalized badassery and that is what matters most.

2 - 2023 IS ANOTHER “COVID YEAR” FOR MOVIES

Remember when Marvel Studios had to drop 4 movies in a six month span in 2021 and the only one that made north of $500 million was Spider-Man: No Way Home? That was the beginning of the over-saturation problem with comic book movies. Asking the general audience to hit the theater FOUR times from the span of July to December was a big ask, and Sony and WB releasing Venom: Let There Be Carnage and The Suicide Squad respectively didn’t help de-clutter things at all.

We blamed it on COVID and movie theaters still having stricter capacity issues across the country, but now, two years later, in a movie schedule that saw the likes of Indiana Jones, Mission: Impossible, Transformers and Fast and Furious all either underperform or flat out bomb at the box office, it’s clear that there are too many tentpole franchise films, let alone comic book films, releasing every year. Hence, the over-saturation problem has gotten worse, and you can hardly blame Blue Beetle for that alone.

3 - THE WGA AND SAG-AFTRA STRIKES

You do realize that the studios that stand to profit more from a comic book movie’s theatrical success at the box office are the exact same studios that refuse to pay writers and actors a living wage that amounts to not even 1% of their total revenue? The same studios with CEOs that cry foul about how little money they’re making while phoning in bought and paid for press statements from their luxury yachts paid for with whatever earned the previous month?

Why should you care at all about money that isn’t yours? Especially when it came out of your wallet in the first place, and WON’T go to the Hollywood creatives that are working 3 to 4 jobs a week to pay bills that the studio is hoping will crush them in the middle of a work stoppage? The fact that these studios control the rights to your favorite fandom is all the more reason you should be protesting against them, not siding with them when they use a failed box office run as a excuse not to pay their employees sooner than a year late.

4 - STREAMING AND DIGITAL SUCCESS

The first week that The Flash released on digital, it led the way in digital sales at Number 1 for the first week. As has been pointed out by many, the secondary market has been a source of financial success for Hollywood for decades, previously with home video and physical media sales, and now with VOD and streaming app revenue. Of course, without full transparency of how those numbers work with the studios, we’ll never fully know just how profitable streaming numbers are, but just the presence of a secondary market for any film, let alone comic book films, is enough for the studios’ claims of financial destitution to fall on deaf ears, especially when measured against the salaries of the studio CEOs, as has been detailed during the strikes.

Whether Blue Beetle leaps off the digital sales charts or not when it does release digitally, the odds of it not selling at all and reaping some further financial gain for WBD is slim to none. It’s just not as “sexy” and appealing as how box office is treated by film elites.

5 - BLUE BEETLE IS CLEARLY PART OF GUNN’S DCU PLAN

While so many fans have been arguing over whether or not Blue Beetle is the first DCU movie in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s grand plan, they’re not paying attention to what he’s actually been saying:

“Jaime Reyes, who will be an amazing part of the DCU going forward.” Intriguing.

Now granted, he’s not going to say “if his first film does well” or “because his sequel is guaranteed,” but even if you think this is just standard PR spin before a release, you can’t help but think that Gunn already has Blue Beetle entrenched in his future plans for the DCU whether this movie existed or not, and even if it doesn’t light the world on fire at the box office, considering that it was originally a streaming-only that was moved to theatrical release, and given that the performances of Shazam: Fury of the Gods and The Flash have already led pundits and studio heads to project lesser numbers for Blue Beetle, it doesn’t make sense for Gunn to say this just days before the wide release of the movie if he’s just going to change his mind after an underperforming box office run.

Make no mistake, the DCU’s first film is objectively Superman: Legacy, but it seems pretty obvious at this point that Jaime Reyes’ Blue Beetle will turn up down the road, and if Gunn alters that course based on box office numbers in the middle of the 2023 slog, then some serious questions about the creative freedom of the DCU itself need to be asked at that point.

If none of this has convinced how stupid it is to care about Blue Beetle’s box office, and if you still want to act like how much a movie makes theatrically is directly related to how good or bad it is, then that’s your business as a painfully boring, utterly moronic film fan if you so choose.

The rest of us are going to enjoy the fact that Latinos have a badass comic book movie now, and it’s called Blue Beetle, and there’s nothing a single hater in any direction can do about it.