Justice League Suffers Smallest DC Box Office Opening Yet

Following the major box office success of Wonder Woman, Warner Bros. hoped for an upward trend for its DC Comics-inspired movie series. However, its latest offering – superhero team-up Justice League – fell well below expectation; in fact, Justice League experienced the weakest opening weekend of all DC’s films to date. According to Variety, Justice League opened with just $96 million in the US, which is $14 million below the studio’s estimate.

Smallest DC Box Office Opening Yet

For Justice League, Warner Bros. and DC estimated opening weekend takings of $110 million. The film’s lacklustre opening, though, will hurt the studio more than its humdrum reviews.

Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst with comScore, told Variety:

“For every macro budget superhero movie the stakes are incredibly high and with that comes an enormous pressure to exceed all expectations and for DC, this has never been more true.  In the wake of the much-needed home run that was ‘Wonder Woman,’ the momentum was with the brand and great expectations placed on the very broad shoulders of ‘Justice League’ to keep that train moving.

With the rightfully heightened expectations for a movie of this magnitude comes a greater scrutiny of both the quality of the movie as determined by critics and of course the profitability of the film, but the ultimate arbiter are moviegoers who seem to have found the concept and the event nature of the film enough to get them out to the movie theater even if the overall North American opening weekend number may be less than many expected.”

Reason to be Cheerful?

For comparison, Warner Bros.’s other DC films garnered the following opening weekend takings:

• Man of Steel: $116 million
• Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: $166 million
• Suicide Squad: $133 million
• Wonder Woman: $103 million

As such, Justice League took $7 million less than Wonder Woman. However, the picture isn’t all gloomy: with Thanksgiving weekend fast approaching, this popular cinema-viewing period may well save Justice League’s overall box office total. For example, Wonder Woman experienced a similar (though, in this case, expected) opening weekend but finished taking $821.8m worldwide. The same fate might await Justice League, too.