Bad reviews: Kryptonite for ‘Batman v Superman’?
A bunch of critics tugged on Superman’s cape, but that doesn’t mean he and his super-frenemy Batman don’t have some serious staying power.
The movie-ticket sales site Fandango.com has seen 30%
more repeat business with Bat
man v Superman than the normal blockbuster, says Erik Davis, managing editor for Fandango and Movies.com. “It’s still going to be the movie most people go to see this weekend,” he says.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of
Justice set a March record when it opened with $166 million last weekend and ranked No. 4 of all time with a worldwide debut of $422.5 million. Even battling negativity as well as Lex Luthor, the big-screen dynamic duo is going into its second weekend with pretty much no real competition.
The movie, starring Ben Affleck as Batman and Henry Cavill as Superman, was met with harsh reviews: Dawn of Justice has 29% critical approval on aggregate site RottenTomatoes.com. Yet the polarizing superhero adventure, one designed to jump-start the DC cinematic universe, also rallied fans for a backlash against the many critiques that took director Zack Snyder’s film to task.
Results were just as mixed in two USA TODAY Life Twitter polls. In one, almost half (48%) said bad reviews won’t keep them from seeing Batman v Superman, while 71% of those who have already seen the film say they won’t return for another round.
“The social conversation right now in the movie world is almost entirely built around Batman v
Superman, which automatically makes it something you want to see,” says Paul Dergarabedian, com Score senior media analyst. “Whatever gets them in the door. Even if you’re just a curiosity-seeker, you still have to pay 10 bucks for your ticket.” And with a title like Batman v
Superman, “you are not going to miss this film, whether it’s good or bad,” says Jeff Bock, senior box office analyst for Exhibitor Relations.
Bock expects a 62% drop in the movie’s second weekend — which would give it a three-day haul of upward of $60 million — much like other films that opened big and suffered from less-than-great reviews. What’s working for it,
though, is that no other studio film is opening wide, what he calls “an oddity on the release schedule.”
Davis doesn’t see it having any major competition until The
Jungle Book arrives April 15. However, for Batman v Superman to reach a benchmark of $1 billion worldwide, he says, “it has to do some heavy lifting before
Captain America: Civil War hits theaters” May 6.
Reaching that goal is within reason, says Dergarabedian, considering how movies such as 2014’s Transformers: Age of Ex
tinction get savaged by critics (18% approval on Rotten Tomatoes) and then do big business internationally ($1.1 billion). In the case of Batman v Superman, “it may be even more so about the brand than the built-in cultural resonance with the American audience.”
The most important thing about Dawn of Justice isn’t its bottom line or lack of accolades, Bock says. “It is relaunching a new universe” of upcoming DC movies such as Suicide Squad and
Wonder Woman, he says. “And that (equals) billions after billions after billions of dollars down the road.”