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Suicide Squad made $135 million at box office despite appallingly bad reviews

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The reviews for Suicide Squad came out last week, and they were overwhelming terrible. When I wrote about the reviews last week, Rotten Tomatoes had the critics’ score hovering around 32-33%. Hilariously, as more people/critics saw the film, the score got even lower. As of Sunday, RT had the film rated at 26%, which is pretty sh—ty. But much like Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, the bad reviews didn’t hurt the box office. It seems like fan-boys will literally spend their money on anything… anything involving capes, 2 Fast 2 Batfleck, gun violence, misogyny and Margot Robbie.

Bad reviews can’t kill Suicide Squad. The critically maligned supervillain team-up scored the biggest August debut ever with $135.1 million at the weekend box office, according to tracking firm comScore. Its No. 1 opening smashes a record set by Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014 when that Disney/Marvel movie blasted off with $94.3 million on its way to $333.2 million. It also narrowly outpaced February’s opening of another dark superhero comedy, Deadpool, which started with $132.4 million and much stronger reviews (84% positive on RottenTomatoes.com, compared with Suicide’s 26% approval rating).

[From USA Today]

The $135 million figure was on target with the domestic pre-estimate figures I saw. The really optimistic box-office watchers thought Suicide Squad might be able to hit $145 million, but on the lower, more conservative end, people thought it would definitely hit $125 million. So it met expectations, if not exceeded expectations. Suicide Squad is a massive hit overseas too: in its first five days at the international box office, it scored $132 million.

Reportedly, Suicide Squad cost $175 million to make, although it wouldn’t surprise me if that too is a conservative number. Warner Bros really went all out to promote the film, waging a massive, months-long campaign and financing reshoots when the first cut was (apparently) a disaster with test audiences. That brings me to one of my pet projects: being the resident bitchy Cassandra, repeatedly saying that this business model cannot stand. Hollywood cannot continue to spend $250-million-plus on superhero films. Eventually, the bottom will drop out, because the bottom always drops out. Especially if the product was shoddy to begin with, which seems to be the case with the DC Comics Universe these days.

Incidentally, Jared Leto has been complaining about all of the stuff that was cut from the film, saying: “Were there any [scenes] that didn’t get cut? I’m asking you, were there any that didn’t get cut? There were so many scenes that got cut from the movie, I couldn’t even start. I think that the Joker… we did a lot of experimentation on the set, we explored a lot. There’s so much that we shot that’s not in the film.” It wouldn’t surprise me at all if that was the point of the reshoots: less Jared Leto, more Margot Robbie.

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Photos courtesy of WENN, Warner Bros.

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