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.
Who can blame the public after those first movies? Man of Steel had it’s bad moments and choices, especially that dark color theme, Batman vs Superman was a mess, Suicide Squad can be watched only on the extended version and even then you get the feeling that it jumps from scene to scene, not to mention the completely stupid scenario, Wonder Woman had Gal to thank about, for covering it’s mistakes.
DC is having the same problem with AMD(as we are at a tech site). As AMD managed to make consumers skeptical towards it’s products, after that disastrous FX line of processors, DC managed to make audience skeptical towards it’s movies, by publishing half made films, with rushed scenarios and rushed scenes that jump from one to the next, they don’t flow in front of the audience’s eyes. They just jump making you search in the audience for the person with the remote control skipping chapters.