$800 million. That’s the supposed face-saving number that Warner Bros. needs "Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice" to earn to justify the massive expenditure they made on the superhero showdown (its budget is heavily rumored to be way higher than what’s been officially released). And after a record breaking opening weekend, executives will likely be concerned looking at the stats for weekend two.
Firstly, here’s the hard numbers: "Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice" earned $52 million at home this weekend, in addition to another $85 million internationally. The total global haul is now $681 million, which puts it ahead of the worldwide totals for "Man Of Steel," "Captain America: The First Avenger," "Iron Man," "Iron Man 2," and "Thor." The total $261 million domestic is the eleventh highest figure after ten days for any movie ever, and the film had the ninth best stateside weekend for a comic movie book as well. No doubt, that’s great stuff. However, looking a bit closer, there is a definite downward trend. In particular domestically, which could impact the blockbuster’s ability to reach the $1 billion mark; widely seen as the figure WB needs to hit to call ‘Batman v Superman’ a success, if not just merely profitable.
Domestically, the film saw an pretty massive audience drop of -68.4%. Interestingly, that is the same drop Zack Snyder‘s equally critically savaged "Sucker Punch" saw in its second weekend, and it had roughly the same Rotten Tomatoes score as ‘Dawn Of Justice’ (24% vs. 29% for ‘BvS’). And it’s the highest second week drop for any Batman or Superman film ever. Given that WB has already taken the rare move of announcing the home video release date for ‘Batman v Superman’ for mid-July following the opening weekend, one could argue their own internal number crunching is showing the movie will not have a lengthy run. Thus, they are choosing to strike the home video release iron as quickly as possible where they can hopefully earn a few more bucks from the extended, R-rated cut.
And while internationally the movie is holding up pretty well, in China, the film’s biggest grossing overseas market at the moment, ‘Batman v Superman’ took an -85% dive in ticket sales on Friday, compared to opening day a week ago. And it has slipped from first to fourth place at the box office in the country. For the movie to hit the magic $1 billion mark, it needs to hold steady abroad, and right now, that’s looking a bit questionable as the foreign box-office second week drop was also a stiff -66.8%.
All of these numbers are worth viewing in the context that ‘Batman v Superman’ faced no major competition this weekend. The rest of Hollywood didn’t schedule any big openings, likely choosing to stay out of the way of what they perceived would be a juggernaut. However, one wonders how much bigger of a hit the superhero movie would’ve faced had another major film gone wide this weekend.
Also opening this weekend was "God’s Not Dead 2." The faith-based crowd was not moved by the sequel, with the picture earning $8 million, less than its predecessor despite playing on double the number of screens. Meanwhile, comedy "Meet The Blacks" did $4 million on just over 1,000 screens.
"Eye In The Sky" added over 900 screens and landed in the top ten with $4 million, while Richard Linklater‘s "Everybody Wants Some!!" opened in limited release to $323,000 across nineteen screens, for a PSA of $17,000.
1. “Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice” — $52.3 million ($261.4 mil.)
2. “Zootopia” — $20 million ($275.9 mil.)
3. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” — $11.1 million ($36.4 mil.)
4. “God’s Not Dead 2” — $8.1 million
5. “Miracles From Heaven” — $7.5 million ($46.8 mil.)
6. “The Divergent Series: Allegiant” — $5.7 million ($56.3 mil.)
7. “10 Cloverfield Lane” — $4.7 million ($63.5 mil.)
8. “Meet The Blacks” — $4.08 million
9. “Eye In The Sky” — $4.05 million ($6.1 mil.)
10. “Deadpool” — $3.5 million ($355 mil.)
