20 Years Ago, A Misguided Marvel Spin-Off Tanked At The Box Office

(Welcome to Tales from the Box Office, our column that examines box office miracles, disasters, and everything in between, as well as what we can learn from them.)

Marvel wasn’t always the powerhouse that it is now. Even years after “Blade” and “X-Men” hit it big, it took a while for the industry to catch up and start regularly turning Marvel Comics characters into successful theatrical franchises. When “Iron Man” hit theaters in 2008 and kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it, everything changed. But in the early 2000s, there was kind of a wild west vibe going on. In that time, some real clunkers made their way out into the world. “Elektra” is at or very near the top (or perhaps bottom) of that list.

Released in early 2005 by 20th Century Fox, the film served as a spin-off of 2003’s “Daredevil” starring Ben Affleck, which was at best a modest financial success despite being a critical disaster. Yet, that was enough for the brass at Fox to move forward with a solo film centered on Jennifer Garner’s titular assassin. It proved to be a pretty bad decision, one that helped show every other studio attempting to get in on the superhero gold rush precisely what not to do.

In this week’s Tales from the Box Office, we’re looking back at “Elektra” in honor of its 20th anniversary. We’ll go over how the film came to be, how Jennifer Garner was essentially forced to star in it, what happened once it reached theaters, what went down in the aftermath of its release, and what lessons we can learn from it all these years later. Let’s dig in, shall we?

“Elektra” as we know it centers on Elektra Natchios (Garner), picking up after her death at the hands of Bullseye (Colin Farrell) in “Daredevil.” The deadly assassin is brought back to life by the Order of the Hand, the elite group of ninja assassins who trained her. She is then ordered to kill a man and his teenage daughter, which doesn’t sit right with her, leading her to go to battle with the Hand.

Marvel and Hollywood had been trying to make an “Elektra” movie dating back to the ’80s thanks to the success of Frank Miller’s run with the character in the comics. Per a 1992 article in Variety, Oliver Stone (“Platoon”) was once looking to make an “Elektra Assassin” feature film that never came to pass. This to say, the idea pre-dates 2003’s “Daredevil.”

Nonetheless, the idea of doing a spin-off related to a movie that was a critical failure and not a huge financial success was an odd choice. It also doesn’t help that the stars haven’t been kind to it over the years. Speaking in 2013, Affleck called “Daredevil” the only movie he regrets making:

“The only movie I actually regret is ‘Daredevil.’ It just kills me. I love that story, that character, and the fact that it got f****d up the way it did stays with me.”

As for Garner, she didn’t seem too hot on the idea either. “I heard [‘Elektra’] was awful. [Jennifer] called me and told me it was awful,” her ex-boyfriend Michael Vartan told SFGate in January 2005. “She had to do it because of ‘Daredevil.’ It was in her contract.”

Indeed, stars often sign multi-picture deals when they sign a contract for a potential franchise. So, whether or not Garner thought “Elektra” was a good idea was sort of irrelevant. Lest she violate said contract, she was obligated to do the film. That’s not exactly a good way to start a major production such as this, but Fox felt it was the way to go. So it went.

Why would Fox want to force Garner into this? At the time, she was in the midst of her run on the very popular series “Alias.” Created by J.J. Abrams long before his feature directorial debut “Mission: Impossible III,” the show was a big hit and Garner was arguably at the height of her powers. But she was also still under contract for that series as well, which made things complicated.

Rob Bowman (“Reign of Fire”) was selected to direct “Elektra,” with a cast that includes the likes of Terrence Stamp (Stick), Kirsten Prout (Abby Miller), and Will Yun Lee (Kirigi). To put it mildly, Fox didn’t make it easy on the filmmaker. In an October 2005 interview with IGN, Bowman explained that he and his crew were on a very tight schedule centered around Garner’s limited availability:

“The process of making this film was very, very compressed. Jennifer showed up within days of the first day of shooting, and I went back to work with her just days after wrapping on ‘Alias.’ The prep was very, very compressed. But that was just the nature of the beast. We had to start shooting when Jennifer finished ‘Alias’ and we had to let her go at the end of her hiatus, and that drove everything.

Bowman was working on a tight timetable and a relatively tight budget, said to be in the $43 million range (though some estimates peg it closer to $60 million). Even accounting for inflation, that’s on the low end for a comic book movie. That would put it in a similar range as 2019’s “Joker,” though it wasn’t nearly as profitable. As Bowman further explained in that same interview, the whole endeavor was rather hectic:

“I got it done. I’d come back to the studio and I’d watch a reel. I’d give them notes. I’d get in my car and I’d drive to Burbank for the color and give them notes. I’d go to the lab for the print and give them notes. It was just due to the nature of the short post, and we wanted to hit a certain release date. And you’ve got to do what you’ve to do.”

Fox decided to essentially dump “Elektra” in early January, which is notoriously not a prime month for big releases. That narrative has changed a bit in recent years but, generally speaking, crowd-pleasing hits like Liam Neeson’s “Taken” were the exception rather than the rule for January releases back then. That did not bode well.

To make matters worse, critics were very, very unkind to the film. It still ranks as one of the worst-reviewed Marvel films ever, right up there with the likes of Josh Trank’s “Fantastic Four” from 2015. To this day, “Elektra” holds an abysmal 11% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. So, when the film opened in theaters on January 14, 2005, it had just about everything working against it.

On opening weekend, the Marvel spin-off barely cracked the top five for the weekend with a $12.8 million opening. “Coach Carter” took the top spot, while even Warner Bros.’ oft-forgotten “Racing Stripes” placed higher in the number four spot. Plus, “Meet the Fockers” was still in the middle of its $522 million run. It got worse rather quickly, as Bowman’s film fell off a cliff in weekend two before dropping well out of the top 10 entirely by weekend three.

In the end, “Elektra” finished its theatrical run with $24.4 million domestically to go with a better but still terrible $32.5 million overseas for a grand total of $56.9 million worldwide. To put it another way, that was roughly 32% of the $179 million “Daredevil” had made roughly two years earlier. The whole thing was a trainwreck.

Even with a big bomb like “Elektra,” Fox was willing to pour some relatively significant resources into the DVD release. While the physical media market is far from dead, it’s a shadow of what it was in the early 2000s. To that end, Bowman was allowed to do a pretty significant director’s cut for the DVD, which he talked about in that same IGN interview:

“The studio allowed me to re-edit the thing without any discussion from them. I just sat in a room with my editor and cut it the way I wanted to. Beyond that, beyond just re-color-timing it and making it look as rich as I could, I also wanted to make it tailored for home entertainment, because that’s such a different presentation.”

The DVD also included an axed cameo by Affleck’s Daredevil, which didn’t make either cut of the film. For what it’s worth, the director’s cut of “Elektra” is considered to be an improvement, but that only gets one so far. It would be a full decade later before we would get a truly proper rendition of the character when Elodie Yung was cast as Elektra for “Daredevil” season 2 on Netflix. Mind you, this was firmly into the MCU era; not that bad comic book adaptations weren’t still happening, but they were fewer and further between.

As for Garner, her version of the character was eventually given a redemption tour as well. Garner returned as Elektra in 2024’s “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which became the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time with more than $1.3 billion at the worldwide box office to its name. While that role couldn’t go back in time and make Garner’s solo movie better, it helped provide some closure, to be certain.

Even before cinematic universes were all the rage in Hollywood, Fox saw the potential in having various superheroes appearing in each other’s movies and then using those movies to tee up other movies. The problem? It doesn’t really work when the movie you’re using to build this enterprise wasn’t very good — or all that successful — in the first place. “Daredevil” was only kind of a hit. It would have been better to leave well enough alone.

Making “Elektra” smelled like a fool’s errand from the beginning. From forcing the lead actor to make the movie to the rushed production, none of this was coming from a creative place. That’s not a recipe for success. Part of the reason that Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” was such a hit in 2002 is that it embraced the essence of the titular character and was made with care. It wasn’t made simply because “audiences want superhero movies.” There’s more to it than that. There’s still more to it than that two decades later.

It’s perhaps more forgivable that something like 2004’s “Blade: Trinity” turned out to be such a mess. The previous two “Blade” movies were very successful, so it’s only natural that New Line Cinema would make another one. It’s far less understandable, however, when a studio tries to squeeze blood from a stone, with the stone being “Daredevil” in this situation. With superhero movies facing an uncertain future in 2025, Hollywood would do well not to repeat the sins of the past in pursuit of a box office smash.

All due respect, but “Elektra” was a sin brought forth with lousy intentions. Bad things happen when studios enter into such ventures. Just look at Sony’s “Spider-Man” villain solo films, especially “Madame Web” and “Kraven the Hunter.” 20 years later, these things are still happening. This particular ill-fated Marvel spin-off should be a cautionary tale.