Superhero News examines the disappointing start at the box office for Justice League, the movie’s bleak financial prospects going forward, and what it means for the future of the DC Films universe.
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JL will undoubly underperform at the box office. But I’m pretty sure that shouln’t come as a surprise for most execs at WB.
I think the DCEU envisioned as a whole, and started by Zack Snider works, is a great new take on the superhero genre, but as Henry Cavill said not long ago, a bit ‘niche’ product (which will never reach the widespread recognition and popularity of more bright and flashy superhero movies like the MCU or the “old” Superman franchise).
JL for me is a really awesome movie, tons of fun, but in the end it’s a bit of an ‘hybrid’ between the ‘niche’ dark DCEU envisioned by Zack, and the more bright and funny imprint of Joss. without ever fully succeeding in either end. (And, tbh, the unbelievably awful and rushed CGI work surrounding Cavill moustache will not help the movie either)
For those arging about the Wonder Woman success vs the ‘failure’ of BvS or JL, I think WW was a bit of an oddity. For me the movie itself was good but not that great; nevertheless it touched some controversial issues like feminism, or, more precisely, female empowerment, both from the main character PoV and from the movie director side, which IMHO catapulted the film even beyond it’s own merits.
As for the future, I think Warner will finish and publish all current ongoing DCEU movies, (MoS 2 and Flashpoint probably being the last ones IF they ever get done), and then keep on with individual superhero movies but in ‘standalone’ universes with different tones and settings (like Joker origins or Matt Reeves Batman).
Maybe WB should also wait for the final numbers of JL after some time (critics have panned JL but viewers reaction have been a lot better, as seen on CinemaScore or Metacritic readers reviews, and maybe the mouth to mouth can give the movie a longer theatrical run than expected reaching at least reasonable box office numbers).
Also, another important point could be strong (or poor) sales when the movie goes to digital/DVD/Blu-Ray. That numbers can get some decissions made too.
For me, at this point, I only expect to get a three disc DVD/BR set, with JL theatrical release, a Joss Whedon director’s cut (the revised script but without the 2-hour constraint mandated by WB execs), and a Zack Snider director’s cut with a refined and polished version of his first cut submitted to WB.
That could be a real atomic bomb in the DVD sale/rental market.
Just my 2c…
Really good video. Thanks for posting. Sorry for the long post, but a few points:
I think you guys are overstating the impact of BvS on Justice League’s performance. I unabashedly and enthusiastically loved BvS, but I also fully realize how polarizing the film was and how many people were turned off by it. But I think that, if it really were as poisonous as you intimated, its impact would likely have been felt on Suicide Squad, and definitely on Wonder Woman. But it wasn’t. Each of those films ended up making grosses in the same general range as BvS.
And whereas you correctly acknowledge the negative views of BvS amongst a certain contingent of the audience, I think you are vastly under representing the positive views amongst a separate (less vocal) contingent of the audience. There are a lot of people who liked that movie. It’s not Marvel numbers of people, but it’s significant. And I also think (from my own anecdotal observations of the people whom I’ve personally shown BvS to, and who are generally indifferent to super-hero movies), there is a large contingent of the audience that was fine with it. They weren’t passionate fans, but (and I’ve had at least a dozen people in that group say this to me) they legitimately liked it and they simply don’t get the negative vitriol directed toward the movie by critics and certain fanboys.
I also don’t think the death of Superman in BvS had as much of a negative impact on audiences as you attest. I think logically and narratively that the death made the most sense in the second film of the trilogy because I firmly believe that Zack Snyder was using this trilogy to do an overt modern retelling of the Christ story (with Superman as Jesus), with each film focussing on a key part of the lifecycle of that character: Birth in MoS; death in BvS; and resurrection in JL (and I will go out on a limb and speculate that in the Snyder cut, the resurrection of the character played a much larger role thematically than it did in the recut theatrical version). I think audiences reacted to the death of Superman in BvS the same way they did to the death of Spock in Star Trek II, and the sort-of-death of Han Solo in Empire Strikes Back. They knew he wasn’t staying dead and recognized it as the dramatic twist that it was.
I also think you (and just about every other critic) are overstating the tonal differences between Wonder Woman and the earlier DC movies. Visually, Wonder Woman is just as bright Man of Steel was, but also (and this is important) just as dark. Relative to one another, outside of the Paradise Island scenes (which MoS paralleled in the Smallville scenes), Wonder Woman was just as visually dark as Man of Steel. Tonally, Wonder Woman was also much more melancholy than people acknowledge. It’s obviously not a sad film, but it is very bittersweet, in the same way that MoS was.
Because of those two points above, I think the BvS effect on JL was there, but much more marginal than you are arguing.
I think the real problem with JL is the quality of the film. It’s a bad, bad, bad film. I know you both liked it to varying degrees and gave it qualified positive ratings. People are free to like it. But liking it doesn’t make it good, just as not liking BvS doesn’t make it bad. For instance: I don’t like Quentin Tarantino’s films. They just don’t appeal to me. I find them off-putting in many ways. But despite not personally like his films, I am able to recognize the artistry of the films. They are well crafted. I can recognize and respect that. Similarly, I personally really enjoy The Bodyguard (Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston). But even though I enjoy it, I recognize that it’s not a very good movie. Liking or not liking something is not necessarily a reflection on quality.
So I think a lot of your goodwill towards JL is because of the affection you have for those characters in other media. To most people, though, they will not be seeing the film through rose-colored glasses. They will be comparing it to MoS, BvS, and WW (and to a much lesser extent, I would argue, to SS), as well as to all of the Marvel films. And measured up against them, there is a HUGE drop in quality (even against SS which I think is an objectively terrible film). It’s an objectively bad film.
To me (and, I would argue, to the average moviegoer), the differences in the Snyder material in JL and the Whedon material in JL is JARRING. Not just from scene to scene, but also from shot to shot. Visually, tonally, aesthetically—it does not feel like the same film. And it’s not that the Whedon footage feels more like a Marvel film: it’s that it feels like a bad copy of a bad Marvel film. The humor is not clever or funny. I saw it in a theatre full of people, and most of the jokes got zero—ZERO—reaction. It felt like a bad sitcom.
On top of that, the film as released doesn’t make sense. Some of it is obvious things. Like the first Batman scene (where he is clean shaven) followed by the Iceland scene (which, based on the dialogue, is presumably a day or a couple of days later) where Bruce Wayne has a full beard. Or the Aquaman scene in Atlantis which was cut to the bone and made no sense at all (not even to me, and I’m an Aquaman fan). Or the scene of Clark Kent at the end of the film. Clark Kent died in the previous film. Characters saw his body. They saw him buried. There is no effectual way to explain his reappearance. So to just throw those elements out there, as WB did in its incompetent edit, is jarring and confusing. Not just to a fan like me, but also (mostly) to a general audience. It’s beyond illogical.
I also think the running time (which you guys did an episode on weeks ago urging people not to worry about) was a huge contributing factor to the jarring nature of the film. The story was never allowed to breathe. The audience was never given an opportunity to orient itself. WB management’s idiotic mandate that the film be two hours-or-less killed this movie. This is not an argument that these films must be longer. But this film and the story that it was telling clearly did. It wasn’t just that the shorter run time cut all of the fat out of the movie. It also cut out all of the muscle and part of the skeleton of the movie, too. There were hardly any establishing shots. There was very little sense of geography in any scene. Not only did this not allow audiences to orient themselves in each scene, but it also felt like a TV show, with people just standing around soundstage set (in poorly framed shots) spouting line after line after line of exposition (and this was almost (if not entirely) in the reshoot footage). The short run time also cut Steppenwolf down to nothing in the film. He became less than a cartoon villain. He was a non-entity.
So I think quality of the film is the single biggest contributor to the poor performance of this movie. Because of all the sitcom-like reshoot footage, it didn’t even have visual spectacle of a fun-bad movie like Transformers or a Jurassic Park sequel. It was dumb, ugly, bland, tonally inconsistent, and unfunny. And I think word of mouth regarding its lack of quality played a HUGE role in keeping the box office lower. I personally implored my entire social network to NOT go to this film (which is huge coming from as big a DC fan as I am known to be amongst my friends). I also only saw this film once myself, whereas in all the other DC films (sans SS), I saw at least five times in the theatre. Again, I can’t be the only one like that. I think that lack of repeat business amongst the hardcore fans had to have played a huge role in the terrible performance of this film.
Warner Bros. made a huge mistake in not letting Zack Snyder make his movie the way he wanted to make it. The studio could have pivoted after this film. I think, had he been allowed to finish it his way, he would have given the studio a strong foundation on which to launch all of those characters into whatever direction they wanted to go after that. The trilogy was a redemption arc, and all characters (I believe) would have emerged redeemed and reborn (literally in the case of Superman) as tabula rasa in which to build in whatever direction WB chose. Even if I personally didn’t like the direction they were going to take the franchise, I would have understood their desire to do so. But let this first trilogy—this foundational trilogy—finish before doing so. In not doing so, they successfully alienated just about everyone and pleased just about no one.
Instead, they interfered and turned it into a fourth-rate copy of a bad Marvel film. WB doesn’t seem to realize: audiences can already get a Marvel-like experience from Marvel itself. Having DC try to replicate that only emphasizes how desperate they are to be seen as a “Me Too” version of the MCU. It also doesn’t help, no matter how much they lightened the tone, to do a Marvel-like film that is objectively a bad film (which it is, no matter how much affection one has for these characters). I personally am not a huge fan of the MCU films. I find them entertaining, but the lighthearted, glib, bright approach just doesn’t appeal to me. Which is fine. Not everything has to be for me. That said, those MCU films are objectively well made. They are competently made. There is a recognizable level of craft visible in those films. None of that was in JL (or more specifically, there was a level of craft visible in the Snyder footage, but it was cut to the point of incomprehension).
I also disagree with you on your assessment of Geoff Johns. When Sean said, “You should not make a movie where the primary object is to correct a bunch of bad continuity,” I agree with you completely. But that is almost THE ENTIRETY of Geoff Johns comics career. Johns’ comics work has been OBSESSED with continuity over and over and over again, and repeatedly to the detriment of story. To argue that this is not true requires willful ignorance of what he’s created (just as it requires willful ignorance to take his “hope and optimism” comments seriously when he has written some of the most gratuitously violent super-hero comics in DC Comics history, including having Wonder Woman decapitate Maxwell Lord). His comics work is second-rate fan fiction.
Geoff Johns’ fingerprints are all over the terrible recut version of JL. All of the terrible dialogue, the terrible exposition: I know Joss Whedon was ostensibly responsible for that, but I can almost guarantee that it was done at the (likely micro-managing) direction of Geoff Johns. His fingerprints were also all over Green Lantern (both as the creator of the source material that much of it was based on, as well as being on set on the film and, according to press accounts, making decisions on set that the director should have been making). He was a key architect of the New 52 (no matter how much he tries to retcon away his involvement) and, aside from Wonder Woman, that was a dumpster fire, too. Geoff Johns is the wrong person to be in charge of DC Films. He has consistently failed upwards in his career and I do not understand the celebration of him amongst certain contingents of the fanbase.
I’ve written elsewhere, I am done with DC at this point. And I am especially done with it if Geoff Johns remains in charge. I have ZERO confidence in him. The only thing—THE ONLY THING—that will get me to give DC a second chance is if WB sucks it up (as they did with the Donner cut of Superman II, and the two cuts of the Exorcist prequel) and releases on home video Zack Snyder’s approved Director’s Cut of JL. And since I know—despite all the signatures on the petition (including mine) asking for that—the chances of that are slim to none, I’m not optimistic.
DC Films had an opportunity to present itself as a niche, boutique alternative to the MCU, one using the same genre to focus on an older, more sophisticated audience (just as BMW is a smaller but still extremely successful alternative to Toyota). They could have maintained the Snyder-Jenkins approach of the early films and consistently grossed a very respectable $600- to $800-million. Those aren’t Marvel dollars but they’re still very good (just as Sean said about how dumbfounded he was that people complained that MoS was a disappointment when it grossed almost $700-million). Grosses like that—if they’re consistent and if the budget is responsibly managed—could have been a predictable annuity for WB for a decade or more. Instead, they got greedy for the Marvel dollars and (I believe) they’ve irreparably damaged the DC brand for at least a decade, if not longer.
Anyway, those are my (longwinded) thoughts. Great show as always. Thanks again for your analysis (even where I disagree with you).
I also think too much is being made of Henry Cavill’s mustache. Just like Ryan Reynold’s CGI costume in Green Lantern, it focuses on the wrong thing. The mustache thing would not have been an issue at all had the movie actually been good.
You two are overblowing the reception of BVS. If you didn’t like the BVS movie come out and say it. The real problem is that the WB released an unfinished and inferior product. The CGI was cheap and Whedon’s hack job destroyed the organic flow of the movie. It was an incoherent mish mash of different scenes that wasn’t organic. We had no background to each character to care about Steffenwolf, Cyborg, and Flash. There was high interest in JL. It was studio meddling and Whedon’s vision that resulted in this JL mess. I was expecting a serious comic book story that had minor jokes to lighten things up. Instead, it was low on plot and random short character scene that made no sense. Top that off with jokes written by Whedon that fell flat. For instance, Lines like how does it feel like being dead? Itchy.. WTF was that. What about Batman saying my turn. This was edited out too. Over all there was hype to see the JL. The problem was that the WB caved in on making it more jokey and campy versus the serious tone they had before. I believe Sean favors the campy and jokey version and when it didn’t work out, he didn’t want to be wrong by blaming it on BVS. Most people don’t want to repeat Disney’s brand of campy and jokey. DC had something good going. It can be serious when needs to be and funny too. Allow it to work together organically. SS had the right tone which JL should have adopted. Again, it was a bad incomplete and incoherent movie. This is the reason word of mouth was so bad and there was no repeat business. As a DC fan, I was completely disappointed. I made sure non of my friends and family wasted their time to see this movie. DC doesn’t need to be like Marvel. It can be serious when it needs to and have funny moments. Most essential, allow the DC heroes to be the who they really are in the comic books and not what Zack or Whedon wants them to be.
i really dont think superman missing from the marketing matters at all. the general audience doesnt care that much about superman