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Spoilers Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice - Grading & Discussion

Grade the movie...


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It should of passed $821 million in its first week? Are you on a crack or something.
Perhaps an exaggeration, but with the same-day world-wide release, it was a movie that was always going to shoot its wad early and make most of its money before the rather large drop-off in the second weekend.
 
By any objective standard, BvS is a success. It has made its money back and is clearly well into the box office range that WB wanted and hoped for. However, it's human nature to draw comparisons and there will always be those who will look at the fact that the two Avengers movies made more money and indeed that the last two Batman films made more money. Which I suppose is more of a subjective comparison but there you go.
 
^
So it made its money back? I read that it will take a billion for the film to be considered a success.

Despite its flaws I thought over 800 million was still good and it was built more on less than what Marvel did to achieve with the Avengers. DC jumped into this just off of Man of Steel. Whereas Avengers had several films that built up to it.
 
So it made its money back? I read that it will take a billion for the film to be considered a success.
Supposedly it needed $800 to make a profit. $1 billion is often considered the new benchmark for success even if it makes its money back before that. Avengers, Transformers etc. made over 1 billion so that's what studios want now.
 
BvS certainly won't lose money, but the goal of studio execs is not to make back their money, but rather to roll in the profit, and they're not gonna on this one. At least, not their expected/hoped for profit. Same for ASM2. When the expectation is for a billion (a not unreasonable expectation for a movie like this) and you "only" make 800 mil, that is considered, if not a "failure", then certainly a disappointment. I think, after the last two Dark Knight movies, that any Batman movie that fails to pull in a billion will be considered, at least by the studio, a disappointment. And frankly, a better movie would have hit a billion. This isn't my admitted preference for Marvel speaking. I wanted to like this movie. As the folks on the print level are fond of saying, "a stronger DC makes for a stronger Marvel". I wanted a movie that I would watch over and over again, but I barely made it through BvS once. Now, I'm not saying WB/DC should make Marvel movies. I'm saying that they should make good movies. If they make good movies, the billions will come. This movie, while not the tragedy some fanboys would make it, just wasn't billion dollar good.
 
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I have to wonder, if they hadn't already gone all in with all of the other movies, if they would still be moving ahead with the DCEU after how BvS has performed.
 
Why wouldn't they? BvS has performed better than fine. It made enough in its opening weekend alone to guarantee there would be another one. The "they're not rolling in enough money" school of commentary is just a weak attempt to salvage false predictions of failure by those who don't want to admit the movie succeeded.

It's much more of a soul-searching moment for critics than for the studios, it seems to me.
 
Well the movie may be a success, but you also can't deny that it's dropped off incredibly fast for such a huge tentpole movie (falling nearly 60% every weekend, and against hardly any competition whatsoever). And it seems obvious that poor word of mouth had a pretty big role to play in that.
 
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I have to wonder, if they hadn't already gone all in with all of the other movies, if they would still be moving ahead with the DCEU after how BvS has performed.
Its success is comparable to Man of Steel's (relative to their respective budgets), which while nothing amazing was good enough to convince WB to press on.
 
Because critics lose sleep when they rate movies like this and Transformers so poorly?
No more than when they rate crap movies highly or pan decent ones undeservedly. But it's perhaps of some concern when studios can bluntly say reviews don't matter and apparently be correct.

Maybe not, though. I suppose you could argue that reviewing has become a minor entertainment industry in itself, in a way that's about running a circus of endless "conversation" and dissection barely connected with the content.
 
Well the movie may be a success, but you also can't deny that it's dropped off incredibly fast for such a huge tentpole movie (falling nearly 60% every weekend, and against hardly any competition whatsoever). And it seems obvious that poor word of mouth had a pretty big role to play in that.

I don't think that's very obvious, I'd argue that the drop off was mainly because of overwhelmingly negative media reaction to the film. And I don't mean just the critics, but the way in which the media framed the narrative regarding its release, first there were horrible reviews and it was labeled a failure and "no fun", everyone linked "Sad Affleck" videos, then when it broke opening day records there were articles how its success is actually "deceiving" because it released worldwide, then they all jumped on the giant 80% Friday drop headlines(neglecting to mention that the previous Friday included record breaking Thursday previews), and it's been "this movie isn't making enough money" almost every day since, it was just a constant barrage of "this movie is a failure don't see it" which naturally turned off casual moviegoers.

I'm pretty sure actual word of mouth is what saved it from falling even further.
 
Why? As long as they review honestly, what difference does it make if the film still makes money?
It seems pretty evident that a fair number of them were actively rooting for the film to fail and are chagrined that it did not. Ultimately it raises the question of whether the critic niche is all that consequential in this environment.

But like I said, maybe that's incidental now to the mere performance of criticism, which you could argue is becoming a separate entertainment niche all its own. On that metric, maybe it's a golden moment. The film makes out, audiences are mostly happy, critics and fellow-spirit dissenting geeks get to have their own parallel universe in which it failed and everyone hates it... so everybody wins, sort of? Except it seems to me that having to inhabit a parallel reality where the facts are not the facts isn't really a winning proposition.
 
Well the movie may be a success, but you also can't deny that it's dropped off incredibly fast for such a huge tentpole movie (falling nearly 60% every weekend, and against hardly any competition whatsoever). And it seems obvious that poor word of mouth had a pretty big role to play in that.
At this point BvS is actually making less money than Man of Steel did after the same number of days it's been out.

MoS made $11.4 million in its fourth weekend, playing on 2905 screens across North America. BvS was shown on 3505 screens this weekend, and made two million less. That's A LOT of empty seats.
 
I don't think that's very obvious, I'd argue that the drop off was mainly because of overwhelmingly negative media reaction to the film. And I don't mean just the critics, but the way in which the media framed the narrative regarding its release, first there were horrible reviews and it was labeled a failure and "no fun", everyone linked "Sad Affleck" videos, then when it broke opening day records there were articles how its success is actually "deceiving" because it released worldwide, then they all jumped on the giant 80% Friday drop headlines(neglecting to mention that the previous Friday included record breaking Thursday previews), and it's been "this movie isn't making enough money" almost every day since, it was just a constant barrage of "this movie is a failure don't see it" which naturally turned off casual moviegoers.

I'm pretty sure actual word of mouth is what saved it from falling even further.
I don't know. Everyone I know that's seen it, panned it. It's got terrible word of mouth, and I think that's a big part of the drop off. People just aren't saying 'ignore the reviews, you must go and see this movie'.

I saw it when it opened and actually enjoyed it somewhat. They were very lucky that such a deeply flawed film had enough good elements to prevent it from being a complete turkey. I certainly didn't 'talk it up' to my friends though, and they didn't like it very much at all.

DC may find that there's a carry forward of this bad will towards future DCCU movies. They've got a chance to turn this around quickly with Suicide Squad, but that's a film I'm looking forward to about as much as herpes. Still, it could surprise me...
 
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DC may find that there's a carry forward of this bad will towards future DCCU movies. They've got a chance to turn this around quickly with Suicide Squad, but that's a film I'm looking forward to about as much as herpes. Still, it could surprise me...
Herpes, like Suicide Squad, is inevitable.
Maybe it's not to your taste, but expectations are pretty high. See the recent Collider trailer reaction, where the verdict could be summarised as "This doesn't look like BvS, this looks like FUN." It could be a Deadpool-level success, which case I think people will feel much more forgiving of DC.
 
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