Can DC Recover and Challenge Marvel for Box Office Dominance?
In just a couple of weeks, the second chapter in the brand new DC comics cinematic universe kicks off in the form of Suicide Squad. There’s a lot of hype surrounding it and I’m personally very excited to see what a director like David Ayer can do with a kick ass team of villains working as the good guys. The idea of the DCU, the DC equivalent to the MCU, is terrific and is certainly giving any comic book fan a tingle is the right places. Everything is great then, right? Wrong. The problem is, the DCU may never get off the ground. Already bogged down in financial problems, poor critical reception and a mad scramble on the creative front, the DCU is in freefall when it should be enjoying the glory of rolling out the best and brightest of the Justice League. That box office dominance seems a long way away. How did something like this happen?
We’ll start with the obvious place and look at the MCU. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the single most profitable things to ever hit cinemas. Churning out billion dollar earning films like it was going out of style, the MCU revolutionized the way studios looked at how to spin franchises and everyone began to salivate at the thought of the interconnected universe. It’s become such a fad that Universal is rolling out an interconnected universe for its Monsters – you know, Dracula, the Wolfman, Frankenstein’s monster, etc. Yeah, everyone is craving some of that Marvel money and they’re willing to try absolutely anything to get it.
This is where Warner Bros. enters with the ace up their sleeve. They own DC Comics and after some really bad misfires over the years, WB finally figured out how they could cash in big. By copying the Marvel model and with the long-standing popularity of their own characters, they were sure to be printing money in no time. Then, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was released and disaster once again befell WB.
Say what you will about the quality of the worst named superhero film of all time (I personally thought it was a giant ball of garbage), but it earned some serious bank. $872 million globally is nothing to sneeze at and a great take for any movie… except in this case. Why, though? Well, because WB has no concept of properly executing a release schedule and just ASSUMED everyone would love BvS and throw money at them. After all, it has the two most popular DC characters in the title and Wonder Woman was along for the ride too! DC was predicting a minimum of a billion dollars box office take from BvS and immediately began to sink immense chunks of cash into getting the rest of the DCU off the ground. Suicide Squad was already wrapping filming when BvS was released while a solo outing for Wonder Woman was ramping up to filming and the Justice League movie was in the final stages of pre-production. Hundreds of millions of dollars were already in the machine, so you can imagine the panic at the WB/DC offices when BvS encountered a buzzsaw of critical fallout and it immediately began to underperform.
Again, there’s no denying that BvS earned a solid chunk of change, but it did not do nearly as well as anyone hoped. It opened to $166 million domestically which is very impressive. It finished at $330 million – which means 50% of its total take was in that opening weekend. This is the box office model typically followed by horror films, which cost at the most, $30 million. This is not the numbers you want to see from your $250 million tentpole film that’s supposed to launch your multi-billion dollar film franchise. In comparison, the MCU released their own super hero smash up two months later in Civil War and it opened to $179 million and finished with $406 million – 44% came from opening weekend. Much more comfortable numbers and the big difference here is that Civil War isn’t supposed to be paying for three other films. Additionally, if you factor in global sales, Civil War took in $744 million internationally, which is almost the entire global take of BvS.
Which brings us to Suicide Squad. Let’s just address the elephant in the room. How is Suicide Squad, essentially a group of (mostly Batman’s) B squad rogues your choice for a second movie while Wonder Woman, prominently featured in BvS, gets pushed to next summer? It’s a baffling decision. Regardless, after the critical backlash from BvS, they entered into very expensive reshoots to make it ‘funnier’. Which seems odd since they marketed it as basically a comedy but apparently kept the navel gazing tone from their first entry. Which means they’ve sunk even MORE money into these films before they have even begun to see the desired returns!
This has lead to a complete overhaul in the front end of things. DC Comics maestro Geoff Johns has been brought on to oversee the interconnected aspects of the universe, a creative move that was very needed. Somehow, Geoff Johns, the man who rebooted and retooled DC Comics into a competitor again, was left on the sidelines while David Goyer was in charge of scripting. Also, there was absolutely NO ONE overseeing all the films in order to ensure continuity and the universe ran smoothly. With four films in two years and at least 10 by 2020, DC went balls to the wall with the release schedule but apparently didn’t think to put someone in charge of overseeing it all to keep it in order.
Let’s again look at the MCU, which kickstarted with Iron Man in 2008 to resounding success and was followed up by The Incredible Hulk in the same year to not such a great response. Marvel finished rolling out Phase One with the release of The Avengers in 2012. That’s a four-year roll out for five films, one of them being Iron Man 2. This is what is known as establishing credibility, building a fan base and then delivering one of the biggest hits of all-time in The Avengers. It was such a hit because after establishing all of the Avengers in their solo films and having built a rabid fan base around (mostly) quality pictures, the MCU had buttered everyone up for the crossover and then delivered a critical success that became a huge hit with the fans too.
DC was so focused on that Marvel money, they didn’t bother to stop and think about that whole ‘establishing’ part. They assumed with the popularity of Batman and Superman, that would be enough to carry things like Suicide Squad and Shazam to box office dominance as well. Sadly, the power of Bats and Supes combined couldn’t even deliver on the numbers WB/DC were hoping for and have left egg on all of their collective faces.
So, can DC pull it together and turn the DCU into a juggernaut that challenges the MCU? I highly doubt it. The DCU is counting on Harley Quinn to carry Suicide Squad to huge heights since the other characters in the film are such ‘great’ villains as Captain Boomerang and Deadshot whose public profile is nonexistent. The obvious comparison would be to Ant-Man, but again, the big difference is that Marvel had a very well established track record with brand recognition to push that one to $500 million globally. I don’t think Squad can hope to make that. Next, is Wonder Woman who would be good to compare to Thor. WW obviously has a bigger profile than Thor did at the time of his films release when he pulled in $449 million globally, so seeing the Wonder Woman film hitting $650 million isn’t too much of a stretch. Next summer also features Justice League which has the same creative team as Batman v Superman, so there’s already bad baggage brought along with that one. I wouldn’t be surprised if matched BvS, but I’ll be surprised if it tops $1 billion given that half the squad won’t have their own films out yet which is bound to diminish public interest.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s a boatload of money coming in from those films. However, with the MASSIVE budgets that the DCU has already accrued, something the MCU has (relatively) avoided, those are not the numbers you want. I can’t imagine that the DCU slate can possibly stay the same unless the next couple of films absolutely slaughter the box office and more than over perform. WB/DC have already written down a substantial amount of money with their DC adaptations and that Dark Knight Trilogy can’t keep them afloat forever. I can’t help but feel that this upcoming Justice League movie may be the only one we get to see and we aren’t even going to get a solo outing from all the League members. Marvel has worked hard to get the casual audience member to become invested in their Universe. DC seems to be doing everything they can to alienate that same chunk of the audience.
Suicide Squad is out August 5th. I guess we’ll see what sort of numbers it can wrangle up before we officially start eulogizing the DCU.