Ryan Reynolds and his Truman Show-meets-Tron video game film Free Guy came away with a high score at this weekend’s box office: Variety predicts a win with $26 million in domestic earnings. Though distributed by Disney, Free Guy is a holdover from 20th Century Fox, which Disney previously acquired, and as such isn’t available for streaming on Disney+ and its Premiere Access program. (Indeed, it’ll be on HBO before it’s ever on Disney+.)
This is relevant because people who like to analyze the box office—and are following Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit against Disney over whether she lost income on Black Widow because it moved to day-and-date streaming—are looking for any indicator as to whether movies that are released simultaneously at home do better or worse than those released only in theaters.
Last week, The Suicide Squad, which is available to stream with no additional charge on HBO Max, earned roughly the same amount as Free Guy at domestic box offices, but this was seen as a considerable disappointment. It had projections as high as $40 million. This week, The Suicide Squad sank all the way to the fifth spot, behind two other debuts, horror sequel Don’t Breathe 2 and Aretha Franklin biopic Respect, and also Jungle Cruise, which has been out for a while. Variety predicted a mere $7.2 million addition to its haul, which is, no other way to say it, pretty lousy. (Free Guy’s budget is reportedly between $100 and $125 million, versus The Suicide Squad‘s reported $175 million.)
Now, anyone who claims they know for sure why things happen at the box office the way they do is telling fibs. Industry tracking isn’t the same as reading owl entrails, but it isn’t a precise science either. Yet one reason that The Suicide Squad may have whiffed, whereas the lower-budget Free Guy (which lacks DC Comics branding) did all right for itself when Covid’s delta variant might be keeping viewers home, is because it can be streamed from the couch. (Even if someone is a new monthly subscriber to HBO Max lured specifically by Suicide Squad, there’s no real way for the movie to get “credit,” unlike Disney+’s Premiere Access, which charges $30-per-title for the whole family to watch a film as many times as they please.)
There are certainly other factors. Free Guy is PG-13 whereas The Suicide Squad is rated R. There’s also the fact that people really like Ryan Reynolds, and The Suicide Squad’s squad-like nature makes finding a protagonist a little murky. Everyone loves Harley Quinn, but the character (played by Margot Robbie) is not the leader of the group. That function is served by Col. Rick Flag, a character who is hardly a household name. He is played by Joel Kinnaman, who is very talented (watch Apple TV+’s For All Mankind for more evidence of that) but isn’t as celebrated by the mainstream as Reynolds. And then there’s the fact that stories about video games (as opposed to video game adaptations) likely resonate with a lot of people, so Free Guy looked like something worth checking out. The Suicide Squad’s marketing also emphasized that it wasn’t a sequel to 2016’s Suicide Squad movie, but had most of the same characters and actors, so that could have confused fans.
Nevertheless, this weekend’s Suicide sink might be cited as “evidence” by those who argue that people will not leave their houses and shell-out for a movie if the option to watch at home for a lesser cost is a click away. As studios and exhibitors continue to negotiate new deals for theatrical windows, this particular case could come up again.
For his part, Ryan Reynolds took a victory lap and announced that a Free Guy sequel is in the works. Whether it will be released only in theaters remains to be seen.
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