Why Didn’t Birds of Prey Recieve More Love at the Box Office?

By the middle of March 2020, unprecedented times would be bearing down on movie theaters. These locations would be closed around the globe, including in North America, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This global health crisis was unstoppable and taking the entertainment industry into uncharted territory. Years later, the ripple effects are still only just now being felt in every sector of human life. However, just a month before these world-altering developments, the theatrical cinema landscape looked like it was business as usual.

February 2020 began with a title that embodied the new tradition: a more adult-skewing comic book adaptation hitting theaters in February. Following in the footsteps of Deadpool and Kingsman: The Secret Service was Birds of Prey, the first R-rated DC Extended Universe movie as well as Margot Robbie‘s Harley Quinn’s first stab at leading her own solo feature. The resulting movie was a vibrantly violent and visually sumptuous motion picture that made for especially fun viewing. So how come Birds of Prey didn’t do better in its theatrical run, weeks before COVID-19 would become a more pressing culprit for financial shortcomings?

Birds of Prey’s Box Office Numbers

2019 had been a fantastic year for DC Comics adaptations on the big screen thanks to Shazam! turning into a sleeper hit and Joker cracking $1+ billion worldwide. Initial hopes had been that Birds of Prey would keep the good times rolling and have a $50 million domestic bow reminiscent of Shazam!’s premiere ten months earlier. After all, this wasn’t the first time Robbie was playing Harley Quinn, but it was the first time she was inhabiting the character since scoring her first two Oscar nominations. Since 2016’s Suicide Squad, she’d come into her own as a movie star.

Instead, over its domestic opening weekend, Birds of Prey disappointed with a $33 million debut. That wasn’t just $100+ million lower than Suicide Squad and Deadpool’s respective domestic bows, it was also beneath the North American bows of 2000s February comic book movies like Daredevil and Ghost Rider, even before taking inflation into account. Costing $100 million to make, Birds of Prey wasn’t going to be a Lone Ranger-sized money loser for Warner Bros. However, this was clearly a debut that came in beneath expectations by a sizable degree.

One problem may have been that Birds of Prey opened in a very competitive marketplace. Bad Boys for Life opened three weeks earlier and turned into a sleeper hit so big that it was still racking up big grosses once Birds of Prey debuted. If audiences wanted an R-rated action fix, Prey wasn’t the only game in town. Meanwhile, mid-February’s Sonic the Hedgehog opened well above expectations and likely took away Birds of Prey’s status as the big “geek movie” of the month. Lingering resentment towards 2016’s despised Suicide Squad also couldn’t have helped Birds of Prey attract moviegoers, ditto a title that didn’t immediately indicate it was a Harley Quinn movie.

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Birds of Prey Was a Harbinger of DC Box Office Woes

Unfortunately, Birds of Prey, in hindsight, started a DC Comics movie box office slump that only 2022’s The Batman evaded. In 2021, Margot Robbie would return as Harley Quinn in The Suicide Squad, a movie that cost roughly twice as much as Birds of Prey. The Suicide Squad made considerably less than BoP, both domestically and worldwide. True, that James Gunn movie simultaneously debuted on HBO Max whereas Birds of Prey was a theatrical-exclusive title. Still, the staggeringly poor Suicide Squad numbers indicate that the original 2016 feature that birthed Robbie’s Harley Quinn poisoned audiences against this character.

Seeing other significantly more expensive PG-13 titles like The Flash or Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom do only nominally better than Birds of Prey suggests audiences in the early 2020s were just a bit exhausted with these DC Comics adaptations. A mild problem with the more modestly budgeted Birds of Prey became a massive problem when Warner Bros. tried to launch $200+ million budgeted DC Extended Universe titles.

Five years later, Birds of Prey occupies an ominous place in the history of DC Comics cinema. The problems plaguing this feature’s theatrical run only worsened for other DCEU films in the years that followed. Thankfully for director Cathy Yan and the other artists in charge of Birds of Prey, this comic book movie has achieved a cult following totally divorced from its box office performance. Plus, it’s nice to recall memories of experiencing Birds of Prey in theaters in early February 2020, everyone totally unaware of how the theatrical cinema world would soon change forever.

Birds of Prey is now streaming on Max.