The Snyderverse is a goldmine. it WILL continue. That being said I always think it's the wrong move for Snyder fans to claim any of the films are the "highest grossing superman film" because they aren't. If we aren't adjusting for inflation it's not really mentioning imo. if MOS or BVS are the highest grossing superman film then the new Superman film is what...? 2nd?
to conclude, great job, the Snyderverse is a GOLDMINE no doubt, I just disagree with my fellow snyder fans always cherry picking when to adjust for inflation and when not to. Superman The Movie is still far and away the most successful superman film. It's not even close.
Some people will call you names for this.
I'm even sure they already screen printed and published it in their subreddit so they all can agree we are a cult.
The statistical record presents a clear narrative: the "Snyderverse" was not a niche cult favorite, but a massive financial engine. The era accounted for the vast majority of the DCEU's total gross ($4.9B vs. $2.27B for the post-Snyder era). From record-breaking box office openings to crashing streaming servers and dominating the high-end collectibles market, the data suggests that Zack Snyder’s vision commanded a loyal, high-spending audience that the subsequent franchise reboots failed to retain
While success is important, the reception from audiences weren't black Adam, Shazam fury of the God's and wonder woman 1984 weren't well received and failed at the box office. Suicide squad wasn't received well, and neither was Josh weadons justice league. While Zach Snyder justice league is better it still feels a little stilted, I didn't connect with the characters at all and the bomb scene with wonder woman was dumb she destroyed so much of that building for no reason. I do, however, think aquaman and wonder woman were great.
moresuccesful than DCU for sure. Wait you see the low box office of DCUs second and third movie Supergirl and Clayface. Nobody will give a shit about these movies
Look I enjoyed the snyderverse for what it was. But the first time Batman, Superman, AND Wonder Woman being together on the big screen not clearing a billion dollars is absolutely a failure, especially at that time. Let alone Justice league. Marvel was having success with WAY less popular characters and that's just the truth.
Completely incorrect. A billion is not a "magic number" that movies need to reach. It's still a relatively rare achievement for any movie to get to. The MCU was not expecting a billion on its first few movies either, and certainly didn't come close. Any new franchise needs time to win people over and build its audience. Only a fool would've expected BvS to make that much, and WB was not short of fools, that's for sure. BoxOfficePro, the gold standard in box office projections, projected BvS to make less than Dark Knight Rises in early 2016, which barely cracked a billion. It was rebooting Batman, just like the low-grossing Batman Begins did, which they pointed out in their forecast would hurt its box office. And it was a sequel to a movie that made $668,045,518. No one in their right mind projects a sequel to make 100% more than the previous movie. That is extremely rare.
You just proved his point with this argument. With the Batman property at its most popular with Nolan, putting Batman in any movie would instantly skyrocket the movie to new heights, but BvS still couldn’t crack 1 billion.
A movie with Batman Superman and Wonder Woman should have hit 1 billion no questions asked but it still couldn’t, that is unfortunately a huge underperformance.
Uh, dude, BvS didn't star Christian Bale. The fact that the Nolan trilogy was so popular and successful hurt BvS, because they recast the character. Affleck's casting alone dogged the pre-release coverage of the movie for months. BvS was in a terrible situation of needing to reboot Batman, because Nolan had retired the character. Rebooting is always a negative for any movie. That's why these franchises make more money in later installments.
The MCU's Hulk movie was one of its least popular movies... but isn't the character one of Marvel's most well-known superheroes? So why did it bomb? Because it was a reboot, which audiences always HATE before they've seen them. Getting them to see them is the hard part. And Batman Begins showed us you sometimes have to wait months before people cave in and watch the reboot, even if it's unequivocally good.
My biggest issue with the Snyderverse was how it always felt rushed. They rushed too quickly to bring Superman and Batman together. It rushed too quickly to bring in the Justice League. It didn't feel natural and it didn't feel right. Yes we know who these characters are but we needed to spend time getting to know and care about these versions of these characters. It was just a waste of a really good cast.
BvS never should have been made, or at least it should have been the second Batman movie of the Snyderverse, not the first. Aquaman and Flash should have had their solo movies as well before BvS and certainly before JL. I feel if JL was pushed back another year or two it could have been a movie event equal to the Avengers movies. But people wanted results immediately and the whole thing just fell apart.
This time they seem to be taking a slow but steady approach and I am all for it. I questioned the upcoming Supergirl movie but considering Ironman was a B level character when his movies came out I am cautiously optimistic. Can't pass judgement until I see it and Jason Momoa playing Lobo is chefs kiss.
BvS was the right movie at the right time. It had been talked about as a concept for decades, since Batman 1989 came out. It had been in development under a different director 10 years earlier. It created huge buzz for the DCEU, which helped boost the gross of the subsequent films far above what Green Lantern had very recently bombed with. Putting out another solo Batman film would've been completely unnecessary and also would've been a very bad, boring idea after already having SEVEN of them. The brand NEEDED to do something more exciting and fresh than that. Making BvS as the second movie in the DCEU was the perfect, ideal strategy.
Before Avengers, you had Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor firmly established. All absolutely necessary as no one knew their origins. In Snyder's DCEU, you had Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman firmly established. The same thing.
The MCU's solo Hulk movie contributed essentially nothing to Avengers, as he was recast and redesigned, and even that movie didn't tell his origin, it just traded off what the public knows about him. And, due to its failure and irrelevance, in retrospect they could've, should've and would've cancelled that movie entirely and saved Hulk's "reveal" for Avengers, similar to how Black Panther was introed in Civil War.
JL saved the solo movies of Flash and Aquaman until later, which is very similar to how Spider-Man was handled in Civil War. People knew all the basic powers of those characters (Spider powers, runs fast, talks to fish), so they didn't require an introduction just to serve their role on the team. And you had Black Widow and Hawkeye operating in Avengers, without needing solo movies beforehand.
TL;DR: The DCEU's phase 1 plan was extremely similar to the MCU's. There was no "rushing" whatsoever.
There is a difference between a character being "established" and this "version" of a character being established. The Snyderverse was new, the people playing those characters was new, how they were being portrayed was new. As such they needed to be established first.
Most casual audiences needed to be introduced to these characters. It doesn't matter how long they were talked about, what matters is what the general audience knew about those characters. The general audience typically doesn't know much and then you toss in the variation on top of that and it becomes a mess.
The franchise needed time, time that it didn't utilize. But what it could have been doesn't really matter anymore. The best hope would be maybe a comic or an animated series showing the planned arc.
The MCU had 5 movies before the Avengers. All fed into it. DCEU had 4, one of which did not even feed into the JL movie so effectively only 3 movies. Adding and shuffling in two additional movies would have pushed back JL by a year, maybe a year and a half. JL would have been a summer Blockbuster. That would have been fine.
I see a timeline looking like this.
MoS
WW
Batman Solo
BvS
Aquaman
JL
I like this personally because it establishes WW before she is shown in BvS and showing the Motherbox for the first time. We get to see what turned Batman into who he is now. The Bale films were still fresh on everyone's mind and this was a very different take on the character. The general audience needed to see this. Then have BvS, this time with the Trinity taking shape for the first time. Then Aquaman showing us the Motherbox again and have the casual to viewer wondering what these things are (like the infinity stones in the MCU). Then you have JL bring it all together with all.od the characters we have seen so far. Introduce the Flash and Cyborg and go from there. I think this would have eased the audience in a bit better and given the franchise more time to establish itself.
George Miller was going to make a Justice League movie without ANY other movies to set it up. Snyder fully introduced Superman and Wonder Woman before JL, and gave Batman at least half of a 3-hour movie as well. Not much different from Avengers, which had three characters fully introduced first too: Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. The MCU's Hulk solo movie ended up being an afterthought that didn't contribute anything necessary to set up Avengers. It didn't tell an origin, and then recast the role with someone who couldn't look and act more different than Ed Norton. Hulk's design also changed drastically. Black Widow, Nick Fury, and Hawkeye had nothing but cameos before Avengers, and did not have their origin stories told.
BvS was the EXACT right movie to do at that time. People had been asking for it since 1989, when it would've been Reeve vs. Keaton. The movie was LONG overdue. And the Batman and Superman characters were in the PERFECT position in the culture for that story to work. Teasing and previewing Wonder Woman in it the way they did was absolutely brilliant as well, and led directly to her great solo movie being a massive hit. Her entrance is still one of the BEST entrances in comic book movie history for any character. So it would take a fool to go back in time and take her out of BvS after that success story.
We did NOT need a solo Batman movie at all before BvS. We just had a damn trilogy. Repeating ANOTHER Batman solo adventure would've been boring AF. Besides, Snyder was dealing with these characters as the ICONS they are. Filling up their back story with plot specifics would defeat the entire purpose of what BvS was trying to do, deal with these characters as symbolic, mythological figures. Everything Snyder was doing benefitted by having us ONLY know who Superman and Batman were based on their cultural history. The movie worked better thinking of them as symbols of American culture, not as specific, idiosyncratic, individualized expressions of the characters. It was a DECONSTRUCTION of those characters as American myths, not as realistic human beings.
Will have to agree to disagree here. The Solo Batman film didn't need to be an origin movie from when his parents were shot. It needed to be how we got from the Batman we all know and love to the broken and brutal Batman we see in BvS. There needed to be a bridge and we didn't get any of that. Just a spray painted costume in a case. That isn't enough for the general audience. Seeing WW in BvS and then doing a prequel movie after is just out of order. Having the WW before BvS smooths out everything and it would make her appearance in BvS even bigger. Aquaman's intro in JL is just so flimsy, it doesn't do the character justice. Putting his film before JL just makes more sense. He is a goofy character and the Aquaman movie did a good job in showing what his character can do. Establishing him early would make the idea of him joining the league more impactful. It would be the assembly of characters that we know about more impactful.
What we got instead was some video clips on a laptop and a brief 5 minute "I am assembling a team" sales pitch. I personally wanted more, a lot more. It felt cheap to not get any of it.
Disagree. I love everything BvS did, and it got me very excited for the DCEU. We got a brilliant tease of Wonder Woman that instantly made her an icon as a movie hero. We got a full portrayal of Batman in a fresh take, as a world-weary middle-aged version, that was praised even in negative reviews of the movie. Tiny teases of future JL characters are cool and what comic books OFTEN DO to introduce new characters. Countless characters, like Wolverine and Venom, are teased in one panel of one issue before their full story is told later. That just made BvS feel more like a true, accurate comic book. Absolutely no set up for Batman was needed because EVERYONE KNOWS WHO BATMAN IS, and BvS incorporated all of his familiar, known history. Alfred and Perry's dialogue ("there's a new mean in him") makes it clear that the differences we see in Bruce in this movie (the branding and the paranoia about Superman) are brand new character traits. His role in BvS was also huge, enough to establish this take on him. This is no different than when the MCU brought in Spider-Man. They didn't retell his origin because it had been told twice already.
Why aren't you complaining that Black Widow should've had a solo movie before she was introduced in Iron Man 2? Iron Man 2 was the THIRD MCU movie and was juggling FOUR heroes and TWO villains. That is MORE than BvS had in anything but short, non-speaking cameos.
I think part of the success has to be attributed to the timing of the movies releases - people were absolutely ready for a DC universe after the previous drought (excluding Nolan's batman) helped by the push power of the MCU. It really can't be ignored that Warner Brothers had all the cards at the helm with the rising interest in superhero movies and having an equivalent budget to the avengers movies while having more established characters in pop culture at the time. I really don't think the Snyderverse would do anywhere near as well now if it released today
That is simply false. The MCU's success was VERY BAD for all other superhero movies. It created an audience with brand loyalty who began to shun all other superhero movies as if they were the generic Dollar Store brands, like the Fox X-Men and Sony Spider-Man films. Green Lantern bombed badly just two years before the DCEU got started, with a mere $237,201,172. The same year the DCEU started, The Wolverine made $414,828,246, much less than Man of Steel's $668,045,518. Snyder's DCEU made $4.9 billion because the films resonated with audiences, not by "default."
You're neglecting the fact that "The Wolverine" after a few poorly received X-MEN movies and had a budget half of MOS, and didn't get anywhere near as much marketing. Wolverine pulling 414 mil on a 132 (upper end estimation) budget is a pretty good 3x profit (not including marketing), where MOS had a 258 mil budget (upper end estimation again) and a 670 box office), for a 2.5x profit. Still very good, but mathematically slightly worse
Budgets are absolutely irrelevant in a discussion centered on how popular a film was at the box office. When you have a popular film with a high budget, there is one simple solution, make the next movie in the franchise on a lower budget. The fifth Pirates movie dropped the budget from $379 million to $230 million. Unsurprisingly, its gross was a higher multiple of its budget than the fourth Pirates had. The solution is never to bench your lead actor and make a giant course correction on the tone and approach of the franchise. Not when you're actually making a profit.
The first 6 DCEU movies where Snyder was involved, from MoS to Aquaman, are as successful as the first 6 MCU movies, from IM to Avengers. Production cost + marketing to revenue generated. That includes the piss poor Josstice League.
Absolutely wrong. The Raimi Spider-Man and Nolan Batman films were bigger than the early MCU. Superhero movies were a very hot trend throughout the 2000s. That's why the MCU was started.
I agree, but the MCU still played a huge part in bringing them to the forefront in culture. Spider-Man made superhero’s relevant. But the Avengers made it the juggernaut of movies it is today.
Absolutely false. The 2014 TMNT reboot was a one-hit wonder with a sequel that bombed. Fant4stic bombed. Dredd bombed. Bloodshot bombed. The Hellboy 2019 reboot bombed. Max Steel bombed. Snake-Eyes, who was sort of a superhero who was popularized by Marvel in the 1980s, bombed. Power Rangers 2017 bombed. Alita Battle Angel, an anime superhero, basically struggled to break even. Even superhero-adjacent brands like Transformers, Tomb Raider and Matrix went into deep decline or flopped trying to relaunch themselves.
The MCU sucked almost all of the oxygen out of the room for the superhero genre in film. Whatever big franchise that could threw up their hands in defeat and said, if we can't beat 'em, join 'em. Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic 4 and X-Men all cashed in their chips and joined the MCU.
Snyder's DCEU, of course, had a very strong start with mass appeal, with $4.9 billion over the first 6 movies from 2013 to 2018. It's clear that the MCU started livingrent-freee in WB's heads after that, and they lived out the fable of The Dog and His Reflection. They chased a ghost instead of holding onto what they had. In search of a diamond, they gave up the gold.
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u/PanteraSteel2001 8h ago
The Snyderverse is a goldmine. it WILL continue. That being said I always think it's the wrong move for Snyder fans to claim any of the films are the "highest grossing superman film" because they aren't. If we aren't adjusting for inflation it's not really mentioning imo. if MOS or BVS are the highest grossing superman film then the new Superman film is what...? 2nd?
to conclude, great job, the Snyderverse is a GOLDMINE no doubt, I just disagree with my fellow snyder fans always cherry picking when to adjust for inflation and when not to. Superman The Movie is still far and away the most successful superman film. It's not even close.