Batman v Superman reveals an unmistakable superhero malaise
Tight-lipped men in tights are no longer the box-office draw they were – instead, the recent big hits have been cheeky riffs off the tropes and clichés of the genre
Before Warner Bros. gets too carried away with the record-breaking box office take of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice over the weekend, the studio might want to take a breath. The grim, galumphing behemoth has earned an admittedly impressive US$424 million since Thursday, US$254 million of its US$424 million box office in overseas markets. But many observers estimate that Batman v Superman, which had a combined production and marketing budget of about US$400 million, will need to earn at least US$1 billion in order to break even, after cinemas take their cut. Over the weekend, Batman v Superman earned an okay-not-great B CinemaScore based on audience polls. (The much-reviled Green Lantern and the quickly forgotten Catwoman earned similar marks.)
Even if word of mouth on the movie isn’t quite as damning as its poor reviews, chances are that business will drop off precipitously this week, making it hard to go too far past that magic US$1 billion.
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For those keeping score at home, Batman v Superman was announced with great fanfare by its director, Zack Snyder, at ComicCon a few years ago, bringing DC Comics fans to near-fainting levels of excitement. But what Snyder didn’t predict – and apparently wasn’t nimble enough to respond to – was how much the superhero ecosystem would change while he was fitting Ben Affleck into a brand new Batsuit.
Ben Affleck (left) and Henry Cavill attend the New York premiere of Batman v Superman. Photo: Reuters
Batman v Superman was nominally Warner Bros’ chance to get into the comic-book franchise game, which Disney has parlayed so brilliantly with its Marvel-based Avengers series. Boasting some adroit, ingenious filmmakers (Joss Whedon, Anthony and Joe Russo) and some truly inspired casting (Robert Downey Jr, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth), the Avengers movies are the gold standard of spinning individual properties into intra-universe gold.
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Cavill and Affleck flanking Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman. Photo: AP
Warner was so successful with Chris Nolan’s Batman movies that setting up the Caped Crusader for similar cross-pollination was a vertically integrated no-brainer. But even before Batman v Superman had started, they’d boxed themselves into a corner even he couldn’t fly out of. Nolan and his star, Christian Bale, were widely credited with lending soul and gravitas to the brooding, broken Bruce Wayne, who presided over a billion-dollar company by day and turned grim-faced vigilante by night.
Tom Hardy as Bane (left) and Christian Bale as Batman in The Dark Knight Rises. Photo: Warner Bros Entertainment Inc
By the time of the final instalment of the Nolan trilogy, though, the self-seriousness was starting to wear thin. The Dark Knight Rises earned a more than respectable US$1 billion at the box office, but less of that came from American viewers than for its predecessor. Two years later, the hit comic book adaptation wasn’t a downbeat meditation on grief and the burdens of power, but Guardians of the Galaxy , a gleefully irreverent riff on superhero tropes.
