Latest Superhero Bet Fails Miserably for Warner Bros. Discovery

Is the DCU now DOA?

Warner Bros. Discovery’s  (WBD) - Get Free Report latest superhero salvo seems to lack the magic touch. 

“Shazam: Fury of the Gods” opened at number one at the box office over the weekend, but with a cumulative total of $30.5 million debut from 4,071 theaters, it’s being looked at as a massive disappointment.

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The film, which stars Zachary Levi, was expected to make between $35 million to $40 million, and reportedly cost more than $110 million to make and another $100 million to market. It's also a significant drop off from 2019’s “Shazam,” which earned $53.5 million in its opening weekend.

It’s overall the worst opening for Warner Bros. Discovery’s DC Comics Extended Universe, which launched in 2013 with “Man of Steel.” Pandemic-era releases “Wonder Woman 1984” ($16.7 million) and “The Suicide Squad” ($26 million), both opened simultaneously on HBO Max, so they arguably don’t count.

So What Happened?

Disney  (DIS) - Get Free Report also recently underperformed with its latest Marvel entry “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” which had a strong opening weekend followed by a steeper drop off, a rare miss for the MCU.

Are these soft openings a sign that audiences are tired of superhero films, which have been dominating the box office for close to two decades now? Perhaps, though five of the 10 most popular movies from last year were superhero films, so this would be a very recent cultural shift. 

It’s also possible that these were isolated incidents, as both “Shazam 2” and “Quantumania” had middling reviews, with the former receiving a score of 53% on Rotten Tomatoes. (While audiences seem, generally, gung-ho about superhero films, critics have largely soured on them of late.) 

Bad word of mouth may have played a part in these films' underperformances, especially as fans know these films tend to land on either Disney+ or HBO Max after about two months from their opening weekend. 

But it’s also very likely that the failure of “Shazam: Fury of the Gods” is a sign that fans have largely given up on this version of the DCU. 

This cinematic universe was launched to compete with the world-conquering success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But fans and critics have found it to be, at best, more scattershot and uneven than the MCU which, for better and for worse, hums along like a well-oiled machine. The DCU has had big hits (“Aquaman,’ “Wonder Woman,”) and big flameouts, and the under-performance of last year “Black Adam,” seemed to mark the unofficial death knell for this creative endeavor.

Director James Gunn and producer Peter Safran have been chosen to lead DC’s film, TV and animation efforts as co-chairs and co-CEOs of DC Studios, and they have already announced an ambitious slate of upcoming projects, including a reboot of Superman. 

Gunn and Safran haven’t officially said that the current DC Universe is ending and that a new one is on the horizon, and have been very careful in press interviews to avoid calling their endeavor a giant reboot. 

But fans have realized that Gunn and Safran have to be cagey at the moment, because it simply wouldn’t be a good business move to say that “Shazam 2” and the other DC films set for release this year (including “The Flash,” “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” and “Blue Beetle”) won’t be part of the larger DCU story going, and therefore don’t count. But fans have figured this out on their own, and have acted accordingly.