‘Where The Crawdads Sing’ Just Passed ‘Morbius’ At The Box Office

With another $605,000 on Wednesday, Sony’s Where the Crawdads Sing brought its domestic total up to $74 million. That’s over three times its $24 million budget, meaning it’s already on the black before we even factor in overseas grosses and eventual post-theatrical (PVOD, EST, DVD, etc.) revenue streams. Oh, and fun fact, the Daisy Edgar-Jones melodrama, based on Delia Owens’ best-selling novel, has earned more in North American grosses than Morbius. It sits alongside (relatively speaking) Top Gun: Maverick and Elvis as a sign that the old-school movie-movie isn’t entirely dead despite a pop culture, and pop culture media bubble, seemingly addicted to action-fantasy franchise flicks. It’s yet another example of how what Hollywood thinks will make money isn’t always the same as what does make money.

Where the Crawdads Sing, about a young girl who grows up alone in the North Carolina marshland and gets embroiled in a murder trial, is the only big movie offered up this summer season that is directly pitched at girls and women. That’s damn well embarrassing, taking us back to the bad old days of summer 2013 when Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy’s The Heat was almost the only game in town because Hollywood thought R.I.P.D. or The Lone Ranger were safer box office bets. No matter how many films like Waiting to Exhale, Rush Hour, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Mamma Mia and Bridesmaids defy conventional wisdom, The Hangover would always inspire more copycats. At the same time, The Proposal would be written off as a fluke.

The reasoning this summer was a little more complicated. Covid happened to arrive just before we got a flurry of ‘not a white guy’ would-be blockbusters, a slate that should have sounded the death knell for ‘woman and/or minorities = box office poison’ thinking. The huge hits of 2020 were supposed to be, offhand and in no order, F9, Bad Boys for Life, Tenet (the most expensive original movie ever starring a non-white lead), Wonder Woman 1984 (with Patty Jenkins being the first female director to shot with IMAX cameras), Mulan, Jungle Cruise, In the Heights, West Side Story, Eternals, Black Widow and Soul, along with (it’s not a zero-sum game) Minions: The Rise of Gru, No Time to Die, Sonic the Hedgehog and Top Gun: Maverick.

Moreover, quite many films that ended up being sold/leased to streamers were studio programmers that weren’t ‘white guy’s journey’ star vehicles. That quasi-trend (correlation is not causation) continued into even this summer. That’s both in terms of animation (The Mitchells Vs. The Machines, Vivo, Soul, Turning Red, etc.) and live-action (The Lovebirds, Mulan, The Man from Toronto, Shotgun Wedding, Antebellum, etc., etc.). Without getting too conspiratorial, many/most of the big movies that held theatres up last summer were some combination of female-driven and minority-driven (Black Widow, A Quiet Place part II, F9, Snake Eyes, Old, Candyman, The Forever Purge, The Suicide Squad, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Shang-Chi, Spiral, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, etc.). Free Guy was an exception to the rule.

Meanwhile, Venom: There Will be Carnage, The Batman, Dune, Spider-Man: No Way Home, No Time to Die and eventually Top Gun: Maverick and Marvel’s big white guy sequels (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Thor: Love and Thunder) waited until theatrical conditions had improved. As a result, by default or by design, the big movies offered this summer were mostly male-driven and white-guy-driven (Jurassic World Dominion is more of an ensemble than the previous Bryce Dallas Howard/Chris Pratt two-handers) would-be tentpoles. Where the Crawdads Sing became the only game in town for those wanting a ‘big’ summer movie for/from/about women. And, shocking/not shocking, it has earned more domestically than Jared Leto’s critically trashed Marvel movie.

I am not arguing malice since Disney sent those Pixar flicks to Disney+ precisely because they wanted those A+ brands on the top-priority streaming platform. However, it made for terrible optics when Disney sent Luca, Turning Red and Soul to Disney+, gave Encanto and Raya and the Last Dragon heavily compromised theatrical releases and then gave Lightyear a full-throated global theatrical release only for the film to perform like Solo 2.0. Ditto to the ghoulish circumstances that saw Jason Kilar greenlighting Batgirl for HBO Max only for David Zaslov to prioritize theatrical releases and junk the partially finished $80 million flick because it wasn’t theatre-worthy. It’s a terrible look, no matter the grim logic of treating an allegedly mediocre movie like a discarded television pilot.

The relative success, around four times its budget in the end, of Where the Crawdads Sing is a reminder that films aimed at women can score without much male support. That wasn’t a lesson that seemingly needed to be learned any more, not in the aftermath of The Twilight Saga, Frozen and even studio programmers like Little Women and The Lost City. However, the last two years saw a deluge of films like Black Widow, Mulan and Wonder Woman 1984 turned into streaming widgets or sent to struggle in a far more challenging theatrical environment, so that the likes of Lightyear, Top Gun: Maverick and The Batman could theoretically thrive theatrically. And now, for having theatrical faith in a movie like Where the Crawdads Sing, Sony wins… money.