Bird of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) is the next comic book movie to hit and box office analysts are putting together early tracking numbers for its opening weekend.

The Margot Robbie-led movie is projected to earn between $49-55 million domestically in its initial run, which doesn’t seem like all that much when you compare it to other comic book movies. But that number is deceptive: For starters, R-rated movies are always projected at a lower total simply because of the smaller potential audience and analysts tend to be more conservative when guesstimating R-rated hauls. Robbie has previously stated in an interview with Comicbook.com that she felt in Suicide Squad that she couldn’t go quite as dark with the characters as she liked. Similar to Deadpool, Harley Quinn has a dark history, as do many of the fictional team being assembled for BoP. She pushed for a potential R-rating in order to tell the story they felt they needed to tell with the characters they had:

“I did feel like I had to censor myself a lot, obviously, to suit a PG rating. And a lot of the characters that exist in the DC world, to be honest, are quite dark. And a lot of them, Huntress for example, have serious childhood trauma, have serious mental illnesses, like Harley, whatever, but I felt like we never… Sometimes you can’t really go as deep with those things if you have to censor yourself. And I thought, wouldn’t it be liberating if we didn’t have to worry about that and really go for it, and then later, in the edit, kind of find where the tone of movie lies.”

The “emancipation” being referred to in the extended title is that of Harley Quinn from the abusive relationship she shared with Joker. In the comics, it was not pretty; Joker was both mentally and physically abusive to Harley for years. Born into Gotham City’s Mafia family, Rosa Bertinelli/Huntress had a childhood that involved kidnapping and sexual assault. Dinah Lance/Black Canary and Renee Montoya have also faced dark days and hard challenges. It was inevitable the film got an R-rating, but it’s excellent to see a movie about a team of women getting the R treatment.

Birds of Prey also has a lower budget than any film in the DCEU, reported to be in the $75 million range this summer (Joker had a lower one at $62.5 million but is not part of that universe). That number has since shot up to a reported $97 million, but that’s still a relatively modest budget for a superhero movie, especially a team-up superhero movie. It’s also entirely possible, as it seems to happen with R-rated comic book films, that positive reviews and solid word-of-mouth will bump the actual box office take well beyond the initial tracking projections if the case histories of Deadpool, Venom, and Joker are any indication. And it’s also worth noting that with three weeks left to release, Warner Bros. has yet to go all-out on its last marketing push leading up to release – don’t be surprised if the tracking numbers go up by the week of release.

Birds of Prey is in theaters on Friday, February 7. Get tickets here.

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