You have to feel a little bit sorry for DC. Having spent decades living off the success of the Batman and Superman franchises, the company woefully failed to plan ahead in terms of their plans for future movies. They were consequently left stood scratching their heads in bewilderment when Marvel’s virtually unknown ‘Iron Man’ suddenly launched the MCU into orbit way back in 2008.
The following eight years saw a painfully slow drawing together of talent and resources, as the company juggled its popular animated releases and tremendously successful TV franchises with mapping out their own shared universe to counter Marvel’s dominance of the Box Office. And then this year, having finally got round to launching the DCEU, it’s all gone HORRIBLY wrong.
Firstly there was BvS. On the plus side, Ben Affleck’s new version of Batman was a big hit with the fans, and the film has gone on to make a boatload of cash. But the recent release of the Ultimate Edition DVD has demonstrated that the studio really screwed up with the cinematic edit they released, and the movie has left collateral damage that neither DC nor Zack Snyder will ever be able to shake off. And then there was the animated version of ‘The Killing Joke’. With that project already mired by existing controversy around the source material, the film was always going to be a gamble, and its proven a costly one. Yes, its brilliant to see Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill back in character, but the addition of the Barbara Gordon prologue and a weak ending have condemned the movie to the seventh circle of hell for a large portion of DC fans.
And then we come to ‘Suicide Squad’. As soon as BVS faltered, the company fixed upon this movie as their salvation. A slew of slickly edited trailers promised a flashy and colourful antihero romp that was going to be just the tonic for Snyder’s rainy and humourless vision of Metropolis. The problem is, its now painfully obvious that that’s exactly what David Ayer intended to replicate, and a panic intervention by Warner Brothers to inject some ‘Deadpool-esque’ humour into the film has just made matters worse, resulting in yet another disjointed and confusing cinematic edit.
Other than some harsh lessons around their relationship with Warners, can DC draw any comfort from the divisive controversy around ‘Suicide Squad’? Well, once again, from a financial point of view the answer is a definitive ‘YES’. This weekend has seen the movie break a total of three domestic Box Office records. Now that’s impressive.
Firstly, the takings from Thursday night preview screenings bought in a massive $20.5M, which is unheard of. Secondly, that figure was then rolled into the Friday takings, to generate a staggering $63M opening day figure, which is again unprecedented. Finally, the opening weekend totals for the movie stand at $135M, which is the biggest ever August weekend opening tally in US Box Office history.
This smashed the record set by Marvel’s GOTG back in 2014, which generated $93.4M when it was released over the same weekend. It remains to be seen how the film will fare in the short term, having already seen what will be a 40% drop in takings as the weekend has progressed, but hey, DC need all the good news they can get right now.
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Source: Box Office Mojo