“The Suicide Squad” Is Considered A Box-Office Flop Despite Opening At #1
The Suicide Squad is the sequel to 2016’s critical-flop but commercially successful, Suicide Squad. See, they added the “The” at the beginning so as not to cause confusion. But I guess that people were still confused and they thought that DC Comics released the same shitty movie in theatres again and didn’t go–because The Suicide Squad is being called a box-office flop, with a measly $72 million global premiere on a budget of $185 million. Oh well, at least when it comes to flops Idris Elba has taken harder hits before. Remember, he was in Cats!
Suicide Squad–a movie about comic villains getting together to grudgingly save the world or get their heads blown up–got panned by critics and most people with working eyeballs, and a huge amount of the hype around it was Jared Leto playing the Joker and he was in it for, like, five minutes. The same thing happened with the Justice League Snyder Cut, but at least that movie was actually mediocre. The Suicide Squad saw no stories reminiscent of the false rat story which saw Jared mailing a dead rat to co-star, Margot Robbie, who played Harley Quinn. I guess someone should have been a borderline-harassing troll on set because nobody cared to watch this movie.
David Ayer‘s Suicide Squad, which was released in 2016, raked in the cash and had a global box office opening of $746.8 million with the biggest domestic August debut of all time, earning $133.6 million domestically. This is all despite the fact that Jared Leto played the Joker in it. James Gunn‘s new iteration didn’t even crack that. Deadline says The Suicide Squad brought in a measly $26.5 million domestically and $72 million globally, despite getting good reviews and sitting a 91% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. That may have something to do with The Suicide Squad coming out on HBO Max the same day as it was released in theaters.
Deadline says the last DC flop was Birds Of Prey, which had a $33 million domestic opening with $201.8 million worldwide but didn’t have Coronavirus or the same-day HBO Max release to blame. The Suicide Squad did manage to do better than Mortal Kombat and The Conjuring; The Devil Made Me Do It, who premiered with $23.3 million and $24.1 million respectively. BUT the thing is, those movies didn’t cost $185 million to make. Here are this past weekend’s top 5 movies at the box office:
- The Suicide Squad – $26.5 million
- Jungle Cruise – $15.69 million
- Old – $4.1 million
- Black Widow – $4 million
- Stillwater – $2.86 million
Forbes has some ideas for why the movie didn’t do as well, which includes their branding, the long wait between the original 2016 movie and this one’s release, the recasting of Will Smith with Idris Elba, and a bunch of other stuff. But I think it has more to do with the lack of controversy. Maybe the movie would have done better if Sylvester Stallone, who plays a man-eating shark, had drummed up some publicity and mailed everyone boxes chewed up fish?
I guess people aren’t that interested in watching super-villains come together to save the world. Or maybe they didn’t cast bad enough villains? The third film should use real super-villains–The Suicide Squad 3, starring Megyn Kelly, DaBaby, and Wendy Williams.
Pic: DC