Box Office Analysis - Justice League

We live in interesting times. Justice League grossed 96 million dollars in its opening weekend, yet all of the box office analysis of this past weekend are talking about it like Justice League is a disaster financially. How can this be? In what world can 96 million dollars be considered a flop. Sure maybe it performed below expectations or desires, but a disaster? A flop? How is that possible?

So, it’s worth it to take a little bit of time and break down the box office results of Justice League this past weekend, to see exactly where it sits. (Note: nothing in this article is meant to be a review or commentary on the actual quality of the movie itself. Just a look at the business side of the movie)

First of all, we need to take a look at the budget of Justice League. Justice League reportedly had an estimated budget of $300 million. And keep in mind that this is just the production cost. If you want to include the advertising budget, distribution cost, etc., traditional rule of thumb is that you need to double the production budget. Plus, given the expensive reshoots that Justice League had as well as the higher than average advertising presence for this movie, industry analysts are estimating that Justice League will need to gross at least $700 million just to break even. The first weekend is also going to be the biggest box office weekend for the movie. Traditionally DC Universe movies have all dropped a little more than 60% in the box office for the second weekend (except Wonder Woman, which dropped closer to 40%). This means that if the trend continues (ignoring whatever Thanksgiving weekend is going to to to the numbers) then Justice League is slated to earn around $40 million the second weekend. And it’s all downhill from there.

It’s also impossible for DC to do anything without it being compared in some ways to Marvel. And here the comparisons don’t look good. Just a few weeks ago, Thor: Ragnarok was released, grossing $127 million on it’s opening weekend, as the third movie in a series about arguably the least popular member of the Avengers lineup. And the argument that it only got there by standing on the success of the Avengers franchise doesn’t really hold up either. The very first Iron Man, which came out when the idea of a mega franchise like the MCU was still only a hope and a dream, made $98 million it’s opening weekend beating this week’s Justice League by two million dollars. And that’s without taking into account any ticket inflation over the past ten years. But Justice League isn’t any old movie. It’s not just the next DC movie in the line. This is supposed to be the biggest one of them all, the payoff of all the movies that have been building up since Man of Steel. This movie is supposed to be DC’s Avengers, but comparing it to Avengers is even worse as the Marvel team up movie made more than double what Justice League made, bringing in $207 million its opening weekend.

Even compared to previous movies in the DC universe, Justice League came up short. Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, Suicide Squad, and Wonder Woman all managed to break the $100 million mark in their opening weekend. Wonder Woman was the closest to Justice League, making $103 million it’s first weekend, but it managed to still break the $100 million mark with only half of the budget ($149 million) and ⅙ of the superhero lineup that was supposed to drive people to the theater. It’s also worth mentioning that Justice League’s $96 million is only about $5 million more than the opening weekend of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a movie that ended up ending Sony’s Spider-man franchise entirely, and causing the company to work out a deal with Marvel for them to produce the future of the character.

How did this happen? How did a movie that was supposed to be a surefire success, end up being the big name in a box office disaster story? It would be easy to blame bad reviews and poor critical response (Justice League currently has a 39% on Rotten Tomatoes) but Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad both had worse reviews and both still managed to do well at the box office. It’s possible that audiences are just tired of DC’s movies. With the notable exception of Wonder Woman DC has made a darker, more serious, grittier, universe than Marvel and while audiences have complained about this, up until this movie, they’ve still turned out when the next movie was released. It could be that this time, people simply didn’t bother. Even with Wonder Woman becoming more prominently displayed in the advertising after the success of her movie, this is still most directly a sequel to Batman v. Superman the most divisive movie in the franchise. It’s possible that audiences are getting worn out, and have responded, not with anger or rage, but with apathy.

So where does DC go from here? Even as they struggle to find their footing five movies into a franchise, superhero movies apparently aren’t going anywhere, and Warner Bros. still has the rights to some of the biggest superheroes of all time, so it’s safe to assume that DC movies are still going to be a thing. As we breakdown the Justice League box office, it’s important to remember that earlier this year Wonder Woman was a major success for DC, becoming not only their highest grossing movie yet, but the highest grossing superhero origin movie of all time beating a fifteen year record that was set by Spider-Man in 2002. If nothing else, a Wonder Woman 2 movie is pretty much guaranteed with it currently being scheduled to be released in November 2019. Filming has also been completed on Aquaman and work on a Shazam movie is underway. What we don’t know is when is the next time we’ll see Batman or Superman on the big screen again. There has been no official announcement about a Justice League movie after this one and while a Batman standalone movie and a Man of Steel sequel are technically “in development” there’s been no official word on what those could be about or when they might be moving forward. DC currently has nineteen different projects in various stages of development, and it’s likely that at some point some of those will be canceled or just fall away. But you can be sure that Warner Bros. and DC are looking carefully at where they are right now before deciding what their next step will be.