Why Birds Of Prey Just Disappointed At The Box Office

1. The Issues Of Wokeness

Birds Of Prey are a team from the comics who warranted their own story. There are characters in there - Harley Quinn, Black Mask predominantly, but also the other Birds members - who have brand power among comic book fans, but thanks to a strangely tepid marketing campaign, the message was shaped into something like "these characters are fighting back against Men!" Harley killing the Joker in that final trailer should have been an event, but instead it became part of a supposedly woke agenda that was always going to be weaponised.

Considering the impact of similar marketing campaigns - those two films already mentioned, primarily, but also Terminator: Dark Fate - you would have thought that Warner Bros would avoid those messages quite so loudly in the marketing. They didn't and the wrong elements of the community leapt on it. It hasn't been quite so catastrophic as some of the other films mentioned, because the film-makers and actors have avoided enflaming the "discourse" but it's impossible to avoid it.

And even more broadly, in terms of the marketing, there's a big issue with how Birds Of Prey was presented. Thanks to the dreaded reshoots - and a studio-necessitated recut on the back of poor first test reactions (allegedly) - the marketing team couldn't pull a Suicide Squad. They simply didn't have the material.

So a marketing campaign kicked off by Harley's cameo as part of It 2's release had no haymaker to it. There was no event feel to it and while the trailers were all solid, they were far from spectacular. And that's just PART of Warner Bros' wayward thinking on turning this into an event: why were the advanced tickets only put on sale a week and a half out from release? Why wasn't more of a big deal made of advanced sales when that can be a selling tool in itself?

And why the decision not to copy other February comic book movies and release during Valentine’s Day/Presidents Day weekend? The data was all there and they ignored it.

It looks like Birds Of Prey's disappointing opening has been a perfect storm of lots of different things, in short, and we can only hope that more people go out to see it. Because it's absolutely worth it.