Why Birds Of Prey Just Disappointed At The Box Office

2. The Other Issues

Firstly, spin-offs very rarely do as well as the thing they've spun-off from. Hobbs & Shaw recently proved that the Fast & Furious brand isn't always platinum-plated (even with a similar title convention trick to Birds Of Prey) and it's far from the only example. If Birds Of Prey continues to track as it is, it will deliver a massive 75% drop on Suicide Squad's opening weekend, proving in the simplest of mathematical points at least that there simply wasn't the same pull.

And then you have to wonder about the pull of the brand. Suicide Squad's initial drawing power (all critical responses aside) came down to the magic of a stunning trailer (which Birds Of Prey simply didn't have) plus the drawing power of Batman (even though his involvement was massively misrepresented in some circles), not just a new Joker but a radically different one, the dregs of Will Smith's star appeal, the debut of Harley Quinn AND the first bad guy team up in comic book movie history. It was effectively the anti-Avengers movie and there's something to be said about the assumption of equal and opposite forces.

But strip away all of the other points and you're left with Harley Quinn - the chief selling point of this movie, as per Warner Bros' own strategies - and a message about killing the Joker. Considering the unfortunate proximity to a movie about the same character (through a dark mirror, okay), which is genuine Oscar fare, the latter point isn't the selling point it would have otherwise been. So it's just Harley, really.

That's not a dismissive point, because Harley Quinn is one of the most enduring brands in the Bat-family. Considering she came largely out of nowhere, that's all the more impressive. So here's a question: why wasn't the film called Harley Quinn? Why split your brand with something that means something only to die-hard comics fans? And then why mess with the comics lore on top of that? It's like the film doesn't fully understand who it's aiming for.

And even more crucially, you have to consider the demographic here.

Harley is popular with precisely the key fans that Warner Bros have kept out of cinemas because of their decision to make the movie an R Rating. While there's some thinking these days - in the wake of Deadpool and Logan - that a hard R is a badge of honour and something to market, it's counterproductive when your key audience is young female fans. Because you've just alienated your most mobile ticket buyers.

The R will sell to people who were already going to see Harley Quinn, so it was a counterproductive decision from the get-go. And it's not even like it's an earned R - it's one given out on swearwords, not hyper-violence. It's a soft R and an albatross hanging around the film's neck for no valuable reason.

And then there's the more distasteful part of this story that we simply cannot ignore. Whether the film ever intended it or not, the marketing did the same thing Ghostbusters and Charlie's Angels did and - in the words of the unfortunately amplified toxic element of the Internet Movie Community - "went woke."

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