The Batman’s Box Office – Not as Impressive as the movie
While The Batman was a phenomenal movie, however, it does seem like it is not hitting the box office heights as expected from a Batman movie. The movie has crossed 600 million worldwide but it doesn’t seem to have legs without China. The worldwide box office also seems a tad less for a movie dubbed to be one of the best Superhero flicks in recent times.
A Failed DCEU
The past decade had seen the whole of MCU explode over the place in terms of Box Office with almost every movie leading up to Avengers Endgame earning more than a billion. The hype is not over for MCU as recently Spiderman No Way Home grossed around a gargantuan 1.8 Billion. Meanwhile, on the other side, DC has no idea how to make a franchise.
After bringing in 300 director Zack Snyder to make a DC universe that could compete with the likes of MCU and Fox and Sony’s Marvel projects, they completely fumbled the bag. Man of Steel was a strong start to the new rebooted DCEU but then they decided to cut half an hour from Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice which resulted in the movie not hitting a billion.
Since then they decided to copy Marvel’s exact formula of kid-friendly superhero theme park films of all humour but zero substance. The financial results were abysmal. Aside from a rare blip in Aquaman, all of the DC outings since then have been massive disappointments. Shazam, Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman 1984 and The Suicide Squad combined have a box office equal to a Spiderman villain-Venom, Yikes!
The Batman tracks closer to 10 year old Superman movie
But now after realising that maybe this lighter DCEU is not working they decided to go back to what worked for them and brought in War for the Planet of the Apes director Matt Reeves to craft yet another Batman universe with Robert Pattinson as The Dark Knight.
The movie has grossed 600 million worldwide against a production budget of 200 million dollars. The movie also had the biggest marketing campaign of any recent DC movie almost costing more than 150 million dollars to market. The movie tracks closer to Man of Steel. But the Henry Cavill led Superman movie came out almost 10 years ago, which is not a promising stat for The Batman.
So is Battinson a flop?
The Robert Pattinson starrer needed a billion just to make sure it was financially successful but it doesn’t look like the movie will cross 800 million let alone a billion. This is also the reason why we haven’t gotten an update regarding a sequel to The Batman, compared to how fast DC announced a sequel to Wonder Woman 1984 (albeit the status of the third instalment is unknown now) which was the day after the movie released on HBO Max.
While The Batman is not a flop, it treads closer to being a commercial failure than a blockbuster hit.
Another reason for The Batman’s not so spectacular Box Office returns was the overly long runtime. Most of MCU’s movies have a runtime of around 2 hours, which results in the studio being able to fit more screenings in a Cinema hall. For example, if a Cinema is open for 6 hours a day it can fit 3 screenings of a marvel movie but only two screenings of The Batman.
More screenings in the opening week also result in more Box Office as the hype is truly the biggest during the first two weeks. There aren’t legs to Batman’s tail end performance as the movie comes out on HBO Max in mid-April.
While The Batman is off to an average start in yet another reboot of the Dark Knight, it remains to be seen if Discovery think the sequels are financially viable and decides to continue the Robert Pattinson era of Batman.
