Shoutout to Flash for beating BoP, WW 1984, The Suicide Squad, Shazam 2, and Blue Beetle! It kicked all of their asses!Yikes.
Also, it was fun, but how the hell did Aquaman make so much?
DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond
- Thread starter dahj
- Start date
I think this may be a "fairer" picture, if we have to accommodate for the pandemic maybe we should show how the DC outliers performed as well.
I think this may be a "fairer" picture, if we have to accommodate for the pandemic maybe we should show how the DC outliers performed as well.
Well, we can see where most of the DCEU's strengths were coming from.
My theory has been Aquaman profited from the build-up of interest from the DC films which preceded it. The film's success certainly did not come from nowhere. Audiences were obviously into the new interpretation of the DC flagship characters, and also took to Momoa's vastly different take on a character that spent more than seven decades being--more often than not--that boring, blond fish guy (with only a brief period of published gold under Haney, Cardy, Aparo and Skeates).
Momoa--and specifically those responsible for creating the DCEU version--gave one of the biggest breaths of fresh air into a legacy superhero character since Man of Steel, and arguably Downey Jr's Iron Man (when the story wasn't channeling the alcoholism sub-plot right out of the gates).
I think this may be a "fairer" picture, if we have to accommodate for the pandemic maybe we should show how the DC outliers performed as well.
Hmm... my first thought was that maybe that showed that standalone films did better than shared-universe films, but then I realized it probably just shows that Batman characters have far more name recognition and cachet among the general moviegoing public than other DC characters. Though that can't be the only factor, given that the Harley Quinn-led Birds of Prey did so much worse. And it doesn't explain Aquaman doing so well. Just goes to show that nothing is monocausal.
Having seen both movies, I'm not especially surprised.
I added the US Domestic Box Office, maybe we should ask the Europeans and others (EDIT: China was almost $300M of Aquaman's take!) why some films work better than others? Mind you, I was freehanding this, instead of using a chart generator, but the squares should be in the ballpark.
(Ignore that errant square to the left...)
(Ignore that errant square to the left...)
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A combination of Jason Mamoa being a bit of a name, director James Wan being a bit of a name, Mamoa being one of the better parts of Justice League (2017), and Aquaman as a film just being a really good version of the fun, light-hearted adventure film it was trying to be.
Not really. Aquaman was a better movie than Batman v. Superman and it executed its creative goals better than BvS executed its creative goals.
If you had the answer to that question, I'm sure a lot of people in Hollywood would be eager to talk to you.
I honestly enjoyed and actually liked BvS a lot more than Aquaman. Jason Momoa is the only fun part of that movie, and not even he delivers all the time. The rest was just.... colorfully dull.
I would say they're both equally dull and poorly made. But colorfully dull certainly sells a lot better than drearily dull.
Really, though, I think the main driver of Aquaman's success was the novelty/fun factor of the underwater cgi that had never really been done that scale before.
Really, though, I think the main driver of Aquaman's success was the novelty/fun factor of the underwater cgi that had never really been done that scale before.
You could say the same about countless things that turned out to be hits. Few in the 1970s would've expected that a juvenile space opera adventure paying tribute to vintage movies and serials but made with unprecedentedly elaborate and costly visual effects would have had a chance of succeeding. Few in the '90s would've believed that an entirely computer-animated movie about a bunch of toys would become one of the biggest franchises. Few in the '00s would've expected Iron Man or Thor to become a household name.
It's never what a film is about that matters. It's how it's done. Successful creators aren't just people who conform to expected formulas, they're people who can see how to achieve things that other people assume can't be done.
We can just take the statement at face value that it's amusing that Aquaman of all things, the butt of superhero jokes for years, has been the most successful of the DC canon financially. He's not saying he needs the situation explained to him.
EDIT: I should just delete this, I don't want to start any arguments but it just seems like sometimes we get into this unnecessary "mansplain" mode as if we don't grasp the context behind simple comments just because we didn't write it all on a quicky comment.
EDIT: I should just delete this, I don't want to start any arguments but it just seems like sometimes we get into this unnecessary "mansplain" mode as if we don't grasp the context behind simple comments just because we didn't write it all on a quicky comment.
BvS was superior to Aquaman, and one of the best of this century's superhero films, being the very rare example of a mature comic book character team up movie not littered with Saturday morning cartoon-level plotting.
I don't see it as explaining to a single person, but as engaging in a discussion for the public audience reading this BBS. The whole point of putting a comment out there in a discussion is to allow people to respond to it, to have a back and forth between ideas. It's not a fight, it's a dialogue.
Seriously, it all boils down to this, right? Nobody (apart from Uwe Boll) wants to make bad movies just for the sake of making them. Everyone wants to make movies that make big money (and maybe be critically acclaimed). Everyone is looking for the secret formula of perfect success, but that seems to elude them. Netflix is the closest thing to a generator of movies that are produced with algorithms to appeal to the largest possible audience, and still the vast majority of them are "meh" at best.
In the comfort of our armchairs we can find all the possible reasons why Aquaman grossed more than BvS, but if they were so obvious the studios would have thought about it too before throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into it.
In a sense, yes. In that it showed you could be successful by being fun rather than copying Snyder's edgelord garbage.
Heh.
Closer to the truth is that Momoa's build-up as the polar opposite of the bland, innefectual Super Friends-esque version, and a film universe audiences enjoyed (only his part of the horrid theatrical JL) primed them for his solo film.