Oh, boy. As much as Warner Bros. grits their teeth in the face of savage reviews and withering box offices for "Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice," if it’s not a failure, then the film is certainly on its way to being a disappointment. The picture which cost at least $250 million (some estimates put that figure around $300 million, not including marketing and promotion) was supposed to be a billion dollar blockbuster, which would turn a healthy profit for the studio once it hit that figure. Right now, that mark looks unlikely, and it’s going to affect the bottom line in an embarrassing way.
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Bloomberg got SNL Kagan analyst Wade Holden to do some number crunching, and counting home video and merchandising revenue, "Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice" will wind up earning $278 million in profit for the studio, a bit below the $300 million in profit "Man Of Steel" turned around.
Bear in mind, "Man Of Steel" cost less ($225 million) and even earned less at the worldwide box office ($668 million), and yet, it comes out as the movie that earned more green. It probably doesn’t need to be stressed, but when you make a movie featuring two of the biggest superheroes ever known, you expect it’s going to do massive numbers, not scraping by to hopefully catchup with the same profit potential as its predecessor. To match "Man Of Steel" in terms of profits, ‘Dawn Of Justice’ will need to earn $1.15 billion worldwide, but that’s simply not going to happen.
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So, does this mean that maybe Batman and Superman are better served on their own, in less expensive films? Perhaps. And Zack Snyder is keeping the door open for both. "I think if we could get a good script it would be great to have a standalone Superman movie. I think that would be fun to do. […] Part of the reason we haven’t announced the standalone Superman movie this time was to support some of the events of this film [‘Batman v Superman’]," he told IGN.
Meanwhile, he revealed he’s trying to convince Ben Affleck to commit to directing the standalone Batman, which the actor has already completed a script for. “I keep working on him,” he told Joe. “He always says ‘I’m like a one movie at a time guy.’ He’s finishing his film, ‘Live by Night,’ and then he comes to ‘Justice League,’ and then we’re going to start to try and develop this story. So then we’ll see if he likes that.”
Basically, we’ll see, but WB just added two more mystery films to their DC Films slate, so anything can happen. Thoughts? Let us know below.