Bad reviews be damned: Suicide Squad is on track to make $146M-plus after taking in $65M on Friday. :
Globally the picture has already made $130 million.
It’s set to be the third biggest opening of the year, after….Captain America: Civil War and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. And the August record opening its set to beat? Guardians of the Galaxy of course.
So in short, don’t expect these superhero movies to go away any time soon.
Although it’s likely WB knew they didn’t have a critic’s darling on their hands, they played it very well:
By mid June, ComScore’s PreAct noticed that Suicide Squad was already owning the social media conversation after dropping character posters and debuting the Twenty One Pilots music video “Heathens” off the new soundtrack with new footage. In the weeks to come, Suicide Squad would lord over other summer movies like Star Trek Beyond and Ghostbusters, as well as other highly anticipated titles like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Warner Bros’ own Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Suicide Squad was the most buzzed-about title on social during Comic-Con week (July 18-24) with 231K conversations to Wonder Woman’s 151K and Justice League’s 110K. Suicide Squad continued to reign atop PreAct’s chart through July 21 with 172K conversations for the week and a running total of two million-plus.
With a social reach close to 600M across Facebook, Instagram Twitter, and YouTube views, Suicide Squad’s social reach is considered exceptional by RelishMix. The film’s Facebook page in recent days added 80K likes per day, which is off the charts by the social media monitor’s measure. Smith is tubthumping to his 75M Facebook fans, Cara Delevinge pumped up the DC adaptation to her 43M, while Jared Leto has reached out to his 13M. Despite the bad reviews, certain flags on social indicated how big Suicide Squad was bound to be: Its 26 videos on the film’s playlist have chalked up 163M views. The“Heathens” music video has clocked close to 75M views on YouTube.
In short, the right movie for the right time, and the sequel will be even better!
Maybe the DCEU will end up being like the Transformers franchise? A series of reviewer-proof movies which hugely satisfies it’s demographic while alienating most of humanity?
Def – I thought the same.
Is it possible that these bloated, incoherent, mean-spirited movies are actually what a lot of people want to see?
Transformers seems to carry on raking in cash regardless, so there must be an audience for expensive-looking dreck.
One of the things that makes the movie business such a crazy one is that no one really understands why the audience likes this instead of that. It will be interesting to see how SS holds up compared to BVS. The last 30-40 minutes of SS is just atrocious, worse than anything in BVS, but the latter has little good beyond Batfleck and a tiny bit of Wonder Woman while the former has an outstanding Harley Quinn, very good Joker, Will Smith and a post-production infusion of some honest fun.
Mike
SUICIDE SQUAD has everything its target audience of white teenage boys considers cool and “edgy.” That audience doesn’t read reviews, and it was always going to see this movie.
SS made less Saturday than Friday, has terrible reviews, word of mouth, Rotten Tomatoes, and CinemaScore ratings. It will probably have a huge dropoff this weekend, and struggle to get to $300 million domestic. WB thus gets yet another DC movie with ok box office that absolutely no one remembers or cares about a week after it opens.
Not surprisingly, the first-weekend audience was largely male (54 percent) and young (76 percent were under 35). But female viewers rated it higher than males.
I saw Suicide Squad in a packed theater ( Lincoln Center in NYC) and everyone was clapping.
I thought it was a good movie. yes, between point A and point C , the fight scene of point B was padded, but still, fun comic movie. I can’t wait for a sequel. People on the internet are going to always write negative things about movies ( that they haven’t seen) because it’s the internet. Either bash a movie or say something racist….what’s new.
Where did the $146 million figure come from? It made $135 million.
And the 40% dropoff Friday-to-Saturday suggests that this will be yet another underperforming DC movie. That’s three out of three.
John Smith says “Where did the $146 million figure come from? It made $135 million.”
This article was written on Saturday 8/6, when that was the ‘projected’ box office estimates. The ACTUAL numbers will be out soon.
GeorgeSays says “SUICIDE SQUAD has everything its target audience of white teenage boys considers cool and “edgy.”
The audience was 41`% female and 46% african american and hispanic. Not just ‘white boys’
Spike says ” People on the internet are going to always write negative things about movies ( that they haven’t seen) because it’s the internet. Either bash a movie or say something racist….what’s new.”
Are you suggesting that all of the critics who slammed the film did so because ‘they haven’t seen it’?
John Smith the $146 million was the projected number from earlier in the weekend (late Friday? early Saturday?). The fact that the movie dropped $11 million from that number shows that the industry didn’t expect it to drop that much on Saturday and Sunday. So great job on the marketing of the movie, but a good chunk of the audience didn’t seem to get what they wanted.
“People on the internet are going to always write negative things about movies ( that they haven’t seen) because it’s the internet.”
Just the opposite happened. Fanboys were praising this movie long before it was released and attacking critics who wrote early negative reviews. In other words, people who hadn’t seen the movie were upset by pans written by people who HAD seen the movie.
And weeks before it opened, posters at IMDB gave SUICIDE SQUAD a rating of 10 (out of a possible 10; the highest rating) before they had seen it.
Some tweeted comments from film critic Mark Harris:
“For future DC Comics movies, an interesting way for WB to go might be to hire a talented writer and director and then butt the f— out. The reek of too many cooks/too many notes/cut like a trailer/bastard spawn of 1000 branding meetings is awful, and fundamentally anti-movie. These movies may be the apotheosis of top-down corporate “filmmaking”; every bad thing about a studio, minus any useful thing but money.
“Big openings, Comic-Con panels, & noisy sight-unseen fanbases are all nice, but they’re PR — a band-aid that won’t cover costs or solve this. No genre is invulnerable. Fantastic Four, the late-middle-age box-office sag for X-Men, Sony’s Spider-Man collapse … disappointment comes w/ a cost. “Fans” trudging sourly to an opening out of fear that if they don’t, it’ll mean We Can’t Have Nice Things is not a long-term biz model.”
To Harris’ rant, I would add a few things that bug me:
1. Fans rushing to defend big media companies (Warner, Disney, DC, Marvel, Fox) and blaming any shortcomings in a movie on the director. We saw this in last year’s FF reboot and this year’s B v. S and Suicide Squad.
2. Fans defending a panned movie by saying “It’s just like the comic book.” Film critics aren’t reviewing the source material; they’re reviewing the film. And the film has to stand on its own, because it will be seen by millions of people who don’t read the comics. Fidelity to source material does not equal a good movie.
3. Fans assuming that any critic who pans a superhero movie has never read a superhero comic book. A lot of today’s movie critics grew up as comic-book geeks. They know the source material.
I also recall when fans griped a lot about the content of comic books. (Read any Comics Journal issue from the ’80s.) But now, it seems, all comics are sacred texts that cannot be criticized.
George,
Big hand claps you sir.
Thank you.
Thanks, Ed.
Here is a USA Today report: “How did pop culture become so negative?”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2016/08/08/summer-negativity-pop-culture-suicide-squad-ghostbusters-kanye-taylor/88329624/
“any shortcomings in a movie on the director”
Studios have the ultimate responsibility because they hire the director and green light his vision for the film. That doesn’t excuse directors who have no freakin’ idea what they are doing. The FF reboot was a disaster long before the studio took it away from the director and slapped a horrible generic ending on it.
Mike
“The FF reboot was a disaster long before the studio took it away from the director and slapped a horrible generic ending on it.”
MBunge, how do you know it was a disaster “long before the studio took it away”? Because that’s what Fox says? Until Josh Trank’s original cut is released, we won’t k now. The fact is that directors who work on superhero movies have less and less authority.
https://them0vieblog.com/2016/08/11/the-death-of-the-auteur-blockbuster/
“This model of film production aims to give movie audiences exactly what they want, as driven by social media feedback and focus groups. The director is ultimately a cog in the machine, as studios worry that these visionaries might get out of control and go “off model.” Safety is paramount. The security of the brand is important. It is okay for a film to be underwhelming, like Thor: The Dark World or Avengers: Age of Ultron, so long as it doesn’t run the risk of riling up the fans and being burnt in effigy.
Comments are closed.