"Fantastic Beasts 3" Holds Its Simmering Heat, "The Northman" Is Short of Breath

Two of the blockbusters released in April 2022 being "Fantasic Beasts: The Secrects of Dumblore" and "The Northman" suffered a bad opening week, and the situation seems to be worse when Marvel's "Doctor Strange In The Multiverse of Madness ” was released in early May 2022, continuing to disperse a large number of viewers from them.

@The Northman 2022 | Focus Features, Universal Pictures.

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The Northman

The Northman 2022 starring Alexander Skarsgård as Viking Prince Amleth in a journey of revenge for his father and rescuing his mother.

The film directed by Robert Eggers who gains fame as "exceptional talent" thanks to directing genre films such as The Witch 2015 (Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie) and The Lighthouse 2019 (Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson) - The films are praised as "perfect". However, these are low -budgeted films, in the range of 4 - 11 million USD.

The Northman meanwhile is a blockbuster, with an estimated budget of about 70 - 90 million USD. Although there was a positive assessment from critics, within some giving the highest scores, the film had a gloomy premiere week with the box office revenue of just ~ 12.3 million USD and the situation has not improved later.

With a score of 7.8/10 on the IMDB page, the film is considered to be worth a watch and interesting enough, but it seems that it does not suit the tastes of most movie goers and the topic of "prince in the revenge" has become too familiar to expect major breakthroughs in content and storyline.

As of May 9, 2022, the film's box office revenue reached only 51 million USD, much lower than the estimated break-even point, the number of screening theaters also decreased by 1/3 (from 3284 theaters to 2413 theaters).

When the box office situation showed no signs of improvement, the producer of the film has recently decided to release the film early in VOD (Video On Demand) from 13/5.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrects of Dumblore

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is the third in the Harry Potter prequel franchise of director David Yates, from the script of J. K. Rowling and Steve Kloves. This is the sequel to Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018), following the confrontation between Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald during World War II.

The film stars Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law, Ezra Miller, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, William Nadylam, Callum Turner ...

Similar to the previous two movies, Fantastic Beasts 3 (IMDB 6.5/10) has an investment budget of about $ 200 million; However, the opening week of the film brought about only 42 million USD, much lower than expected and not close to the achievements of the previous two movies (74 million USD and 62 million USD respectively).

Fantastic Beasts 3 maintains a better box office performance than The Northman, and as of May 9, 2022 it gained ~ 365 million USD. With this trend, the film probably would help the producer achieve a break-even point, but it will be difficult to achieve the success of the two previous films (Fantastic Beasts 1: ~ 814 million USD, Fantastic Beasts 2: ~ 655 million USD ).

With the limited commercial achievements of Fantastic Beasts 3 as well as the trend of cooling down throughout the franchise, it will be less likely Warner Bros gives greenlight to make the fourth movie. In addition, the plot of the Harry Potter prequel now comes to the point where not much content nor many characters are interesting enough to be adapted into another blockbuster.