Birds of Prey - 82% RT, and good audience reception

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Jaicee said:

I won't mince words: a second-weekend drop rate of nearly 50% is bad, considering that Birds of Prey's opening weekend was just $33 million domestically. (Had it opened to say over $100 million, a second-weekend drop of 48% would've been understandable and normal, but that wasn't exactly the case.) As I look over the demographic breakdown of this film's audience according to the exit polls, this movie's commercial problem has become apparent to me: younger women aren't watching it.

Younger women are the group that scores Birds of Prey the best and are obviously its main intended audience, and yet they compose only a minimal share of those who are going to the theater to see it. It's not that younger women watched it on opening weekend, were disappointed, and spread negative opinions on social media, it's that they haven't given it a chance in the first place. The legacy of Suicide Squad seems to loom larger over this sequel for them. And considering that the median age of any given film's viewing audience increases each successive week after its release, if women under 25 haven't hit the theater for this movie by now, they're not going to either. That's bad for the commercial fate of the picture because it means that Birds of Prey has no core audience, let alone a peripheral one.

In other words, yeah, Birds of Prey is a sequel to a movie people disliked, to which end few are willing to give it a chance, and those who are willing don't belong to the intended audience. It seems destined for a total domestic gross of less than $100 million, and thus to go down as a forgotten entry in the current DC movie "universe".  It's too bad because DC Films clearly took a risk by making this film and I had fun with it anyway. *sighs* What can you do?

I saw this movie a week or so ago.  I thought it was good.  Not great.  Not bad.  It's a good movie.  

I think the box office is not a reflection of the movie's quality so much as Margot Robbie's ability as a producer.  She is a good actor, but a terrible producer.  A good producer would have made this movie PG-13 (and it could have been done by only minorly changing the movie).  As you pointed out younger women are the ones who especially like Harley Quinn.  I myself have an 11-year old daughter who I was going to take to this movie (as she was really excited by the poster), and then I saw the R rating, so I saw it by myself.  This is probably what hurt the movie's financial side more than anything else.

Also, I am not much of a DC fan, but I think fans were upset that the characters were not true to the comics (especially Ewan McGregor's character), and the Birds of Prey are kind of side characters for most of the movie.  My understanding is that Harley Quinn would have been a better fit in a Gotham City Sirens movie (Harley Quinn, Catwoman, Poison Ivy).  But in that kind of movie Catwoman is going to be an even bigger draw than Harley Quinn.  Since Margot Robbie wanted a movie where she played the main character, we ended up with a Birds of Prey movie about Harley Quinn.  This is another sort of thing that a competent producer would have fixed.  But when an actor makes a movie to show off their character, then then end up making decisions that are not necessarily good on the business side.

Anyway, none of that affected my personal enjoyment of the movie.  It's still a good movie.  I'm just explaining why it's flopping commercially.