Terrible marketing, and positioned right between John Wickand Super Mario Bros., perhaps the two worst things for a D&D movie to try and be counterprogrammong for.
This last bit doesn't track because the movies you cited made tons of money during the same stage of the pandemic.
I seriously doubt anything like this happened. Do you have a source?
They made certain choices, some love it, some hate it. I'm one of the later, I wasn't even able to watch beyond the first 10min when it was on one of the streaming services I subscribe to (I almost never go to the theater). And if anyone expected some blockbuster from a D&D movie, they were dreaming!
I think HAT is really good and easily matches mid tier MCU films in quality. But that wasn't enough.
I agree that it matches or exceeds MCU tier quality, but that’s a very low bar IMO.
It also just suffered from bad timing being between two hits. If the timing had been better it's possible it would have been more successful. Add in ads that made ot look more like another CGI fest, and even thing like putting D&D first.
Also, the movie business still hasn't recovered to pre-2020 levels. Look at the yearly box office totals, domestic or international - global box office for 2023 was ~70% of what it was in 2019.
www.theguardian.com
