The summer blockbuster season is set to kick off this weekend with the arrival of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. However, the box office prediction for the opening weekend of Vol. 3 is set to fall short of the second film’s gross.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 Box Office Prediction
Variety reports that the third Guardians film is looking to register an opening weekend gross of $120 million domestically. This opening falls between the opening weekend numbers from 2014’s Vol. 1 ($97 million) and 2017’s Vol. 2 ($146 million). The report also mentions that Vol. 3 could fall short of $120 million and arrive somewhere between $110 million to $118 million.
If the Vol. 3 projection holds, it will become the sixth-straight MCU film to achieve a $100-million-plus opening weekend. The last MCU film with a three-day opening of less than $100 million was 2021’s Eternals, earning $71.3 million.
Vol. 3’s box office haul could be another case study for “superhero fatigue,” and a telltale sign if audiences are growing tired of comic book adaptations. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania garnered a promising $106 million debut. However, the film dropped 69% in its second weekend – the worst ever for an MCU film. Ant-Man 3 eventually stalled at the global box office, grossing $476 million against a $200 million budget.
James Gunn, the writer/director of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, even acknowledged the validity of superhero fatigue in an interview with Rolling Stone. However, Gunn attributed the idea of spectacle as the reason for the fatigue as opposed to superheroes themselves.
“I get fatigued by most spectacle films, by the grind of not having an emotionally grounded story,” Gunn said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with whether they’re superhero movies or not. If you don’t have a story at the base of it, just watching things bash each other, no matter how clever those bashing moments are, no matter how clever the designs and the VFX are, it just gets fatiguing, and I think that’s very, very real.”
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 opens in theaters on May 5.
