By Drew Dietsch
| Published
I used to work for Fandom, the company that has ruined wikis across the web. While I was there as Entertainment Editor, I was assigned the weekly box office report. I took this seriously because I didn’t just want my reporting to be based solely on my own biases. I did research and learned as much as I could about box office numbers, both historically and in the contemporary landscape.
So I feel uniquely qualified to say that the negative analysis I’m seeing pushed about Superman’s opening weekend isn’t just stupid, it’s both expectedly and surprisingly stupider than even I could have anticipated.
Superman Is A Success, So Far
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Superman is a box office success as I write this. It had an opening weekend number (including Thursday screenings) of $122 million, already making it the twelfth highest-grossing movie of the year at this point. Anyone saying this isn’t a successful opening weekend is as intelligent as a barnacle scraped off a whale’s ass.
Now, there is certainly discussion to be had in regards to whether Superman will maintain enough interest in the coming weeks to scoop up more much-needed dollars. With strong word-of-mouth and one week of no true competition, Superman is definitely in a position to do well. Assuming a 50% drop in its second weekend (and Superman could astonish with a stronger hold), that would still add $60 million to Superman’s bank account. That’ll put it in an undeniable climb that will pass Marvel’s major theatrical outings for 2025 at this point, Thunderbolts and Captain America: Brave New World.
Of course, Marvel counter-programmed Superman both financially and culturally by releasing Fantastic Four: First Steps just two weeks after James Gunn’s kickoff film for the DC Universe. No doubt that will sap the majority of Superman’s audience, but there’s no way Superman won’t end up making more at the box office than the last two MCU efforts. So if you were trying to puff up the success of those movies, you can’t double back and call Superman a failure.
But let’s be honest, it’s not Marvel fans trying to spin Superman into a failure.
The Snyder Sociopaths
The bulk of the lying about Superman’s “failure” is coming from a contingent that does not want to see this movie succeed, either in dollars or in cultural cache. There is a concentrated effort from fans of the Zack Snyder DC movies to paint Superman as a loser because they have turned that director’s DC movies into their entire personalities.
They are suddenly experts on international box office who conveniently ignore the trends in international box office over the last five years to say that Superman is a dud. They craft embarrassing bar graphs by using the inflation calculator without adding the context of declines in recreational spending towards movies in general. They want to pretend the socio-economic and entertainment landscape of 2025 is exactly like 2013 when Man of Steel released. Spoiler: it ain’t at all.
These are not serious people. They are ideologues who have attached their egos to a series of bad movies (including the worst DC movie), and they will say and do anything to satisfy those egos. Even though Zack Snyder himself has praised James Gunn and his new take on Superman, these dimwits act like righteous soldiers in a holy war that must be fought on every front. Zealots are rarely interested in spouting truth and this situation is no different.
As someone who has done box office analysis for a living, there is nothing remotely intelligent coming out of these perspectives. Superman is doing well and is likely going to continue to do well because it’s a good movie that audiences are enjoying. Instead of trying to manipulate data and opinion to crap on it, why don’t all those Snyder simps go shoot Jimmy Olsen in the head to feel better?
