A couple things to note for people that don’t want to click the link or read the long post. First, the source is an insider that used to work at WB and apparently still has friends in the studio. She’s not just some yahoo with a blog. Second, her open letter is a general criticism of WB’s upper management decisions for their full slate of movies and how that impacts her friends livelihood. She isn’t coming at this as some Marvel vs DC fangirl counting seams on Superman’s costume. In fact, she’s not really making any specific points about the movies themselves outside of the idea that they are ill-advised.
As for her quick bit about Wonder Woman, that’s pretty intriguing. It’s the first I’ve heard of any issues on the shoot,
The good: Enchantress, her brother and Diablo. Go Team Great Old Ones!
The bad: So much posing, always the easy one-liners, and just. too. much.
The surprising: As Will Smith’s 40-ies crisis this worked better than expected.
Yes, one thing that boggles me is how Snyder is keeping his job through all this. I am NOT a fan of him, because of Watchmen, Sucker Punch, MoS, BvS (though I hate the latter two less than others). Basically that accounted most of his recent output.
The financial return of all of them isn’t great, but somehow the executives who only see through the lens of money still haven’t figured out that Snyder is at the root of all this. There must be something I am missing.
I still hope Wonder Woman is great. If you treat BvS as an extended trailer for Wonder Woman, it kind of makes it less bad. No, not really
This writer is way ahead of claiming this movie is some smash success after barely one week. BvS opened huge in its first few days. Just saw that based on Friday’s results Suicide on pace to drop 67% this weekend, only 2 less than BvS did. Have to wait a few weeks to see what its legs are to say its a smash.
Just caught a matinee. The 9yo boy enjoyed it quite a bit, but that script was a total mess. I started viewing it as a sort of meta commentary for America’s 21st-century foreign policy blunders. Let’s pre-emptively put together a strike force to deal with unconventional threats. Oh, shit, that backfired on us and spawned new enemies and threats. Now what? Aw, hell, all problems can be solved by shooting or blowing shit up. Yippee ki aaa!!!
Favorite scene was the Bat on the car roof and Harley yelling out, “You’re ruining date night with puddin!!”
I agree about whether or not it’s a smash or not, the drop off is significant. But there does seem to be a weird pattern where DC movies are outperforming what the critical reviews would suggest.
You could make similar looking chart results for the Transformers movies, the Resident Evil movies, and generally any horror franchise. Sometimes, the general audience just wants to watch what they want and no critical consensus is going to dissuade them.
I would argue that BvS movies underperformed financial wise. Because the benchmark should be Marvel, not Man of Steel.
According to Boxofficemojo, the initial rate of return for BvS is about 1:3.5 (250mil budget for 870 mil worldwide box office take). It was a modest improvement on Man of Steel’s initial rate of return of about 1:3 (225mil budget for 668 mil worldwide box office take). The benchmark for BvS of course should be the Avengers, NOT Man of Steel. For Avengers 2, initial ror is 1:5.6 (250 mil budget for 1.4 billion worldwide box office take). For Avengers 1, initial ror is even higher, at 1:6.9 (220 mil budget for 1.5 billion ww box office).
The Avengers movies are used as benchmark for BvS because basically it is the equivalent of the megamix of all of DC’s most famous characters, just like the Avengers are the megamix of all of Marvel’s most famous characters. Now I’m being generous here, because the Avengers movies don’t have Spider-man or X-men, the other two big Marvel names. In fact, the Avengers made some non-household names household names, like the Black Widow, so it added value to Marvel IP as oppose to straightforwardly cashing it out.
Now I’m sure all the movies have very long tail, from the retail release to the endless HD remaster or anniversary edition in 5 years time. But there is no reason to believe that BvS will have a bigger and longer tail than the Avengers.
So that’s why I think BvS underperformed financial wise, despite Warner Bros keep saying it didn’t. And I’m not alone on this.
Whether or not anyone personally agrees with Soma’s take, I think it’s probably fairly safe to argue that the execs at WB’s are probably using that approach with their hopes on how these movies perform at the box office. They’re certainly not looking at Superman Returns or Green Lantern.
67% week-over-week drop. That’s pretty rough, but not unexpected givens its high opening weekend. It will be profitable, but again, it’s no Marvel movie.
No way the WB execs didn’t think a movie with two of the most iconic heroes of all time and didn’t see a billion dollar plus haul which is why we saw the reported changes with Justics League, and making sure the media was aware of it. The openings show people want to see these these characters, even lesser ones like Suicide Squad.
Again, I liked the movie. I had a fun time with it, and I hope it does well enough to encourage future endeavors with at least some of those characters. However, the issues with the movie were readily apparent to most and it surprises me that someone okayed the final cut that we saw. I get that one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure, but this one had more the feel of someone thinking it just wasn’t worth the extra cost and effort to fix any flaws.
Batman vs Superman, with Wonder Woman in it, should have been a 3 billion dillar movie. It should have been the biggest movie of all time. That its not shows they fucked up big time. They left a lot of money on the table.
I agree. Obviously Batman is DC’s biggest star, but not having the Justice League movies tied into the Dark Knight series hurt his drawing power tremendously. It would be like if Marvel had released the first Avengers movie with a completely different Tony Stark (played by Ben Affleck). Their Batman has no continuity and thus lacks credibility off the bat (heh). Like Batfleck, their Wonder Woman is a complete unknown, but unlike Batman her brand doesn’t have nearly the drawing power these days. Superman has the brand, but their Superman was in one movie previously and it was met with a pretty tepid response.
So basically, they fucked everything up. Whereas Marvel built their property with several excellent movies, DC jumped in ass backwards in the hopes that their big three would carry them on name recognition alone. If they can’t make BvS work I don’t think they have a chance of competing with Marvel. Not only does Marvel have the better studios, but they just have better characters. They have a huge list of recognizable and beloved heroes and their villains are just leagues ahead of DC’s.
We should probably mention that Suicide Squad dropped 67.3%. It’s made $466 million worldwide so far and it was still number 1 over the weekend, but that’s a big second-week drop.
