Over the weekend, Warner Bros.’ Superman fought off the box-office kryptonite of declining theatrical attendance and creeping superhero fatigue to soar to $125 million in North American ticket sales. It’s a hit. Arriving in the cultural slipstream of Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts* and Captain America: Brave New World — which are both poised to lose money for Disney despite respectively grossing hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide earlier this year — the man-of-steel reboot eclipsed lowball studio predictions that it would take in around $100 million over its first three days while hitting the bull’s-eye of prerelease “tracking” estimates, which posited Superman would earn between $115 million and $130 million.
The film grossed an additional $95 million internationally, which slightly undershot tracking estimates in the $100 million range. (Some industry observers theorized that Superman put off foreign viewers by being “too American” in an era of “America First” and widespread tariff disruption.) But writer-director James Gunn’s reboot made significant progress toward recouping its reported $225 million production budget and around $150 million in marketing costs. Gunn took to social media on Sunday to thank fans for warming to Superman star David Corenswet’s hyperearnest new iteration of the Kryptonian by way of Kansas, who adorably exclaims “Darn it!” in the post-credits sequence and even saves a squirrel from a rampaging kaiju. “We’ve had a lot of ‘Super’ in Superman over the years,” the director wrote on Threads, “and I’m happy to have made a movie that focuses on the ‘man’ part of the equation — a kind person always looking out for those in need.”
The legacy relaunch — originally titled Superman: Legacy when the project was announced in 2023 — represents a stark departure from writer-director Zack Snyder’s comparatively lugubrious, Zod-killing superhero deconstruction Man of Steel (2013). And buoyed by the new film’s 83 percent Tomatometer “freshness” rating and an A- Cinemascore indicating positive audience word of mouth, Superman now appears to be on track to meet industry expectations of becoming one of this summer’s top-grossing tentpoles. A Supes who embodies “kindness in a world that thinks kindness is old-fashioned” represents more than just a vibe shift. The movie arrives as the make-or-break opening installment of a decade-spanning slate of interlocking movies and TV shows that DC Studios bosses Gunn and Peter Safran are calling “Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters.”
Earlier this month, Gunn dismissed the notion that Superman had to leap into blockbuster territory in a single bound. People “hear these numbers that the movie’s only going to be successful if it makes $700 million or something and it’s just complete and utter nonsense,” he told GQ. Still, there really is a lot riding on the reboot continuing to perform in theaters through the end of the summer and doing robust business overseas. The film must lay an infrastructure for future DCU properties including Supergirl (starring House of the Dragon’s Milly Alcock as the girl of steel, which has already been shot and is scheduled to hit screens next June) and the live-action HBO Max series Lanterns (following the intergalactic security force the Green Lantern Corps, of which Nathan Fillion’s Superman character, Guy Gardner, is a member). Overhauls of what Gunn and Safran call “diamond” DC characters like Wonder Woman and Batman are also in the works. “You’re resetting a universe,” points out Jeff Bock, Exhibitor Relations’ senior box-office analyst. “And of all the DC heroes James Gunn could have picked out for himself to direct, he picked the number one, top of the A-list: Superman. This needs to come out of the gates smoking hot. I would love to see this do $900 million worldwide, comparable in ticket sales to Man of Steel.”
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
Superman’s topping of the weekend box office marks a reversal of fortunes for Warner Bros. It stands as the studio’s fifth consecutive No. 1 film of the year on the heels of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Final Destination: Bloodlines, F1, and the year’s top-grossing domestic title, A Minecraft Movie ($423.9 million). After the release of flops like last year’s Joker: Folie à Deux (which grossed $207 million against a $190 million budget) and this year’s The Alto Knights (which grossed $10.1 million against a $45 million budget) and Mickey 17 (which grossed $133 million against a $118 million budget), Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav reportedly began meeting with potential candidates to replace Warner Bros. co-chiefs Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca. Now Warner Bros. presides over a resurgent cinematic universe that seems newly capable of reversing a three-year creative and commercial slide comprised of DCEU underperformers Shazam! Fury of the Gods, 2023’s The Flash, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2024), and Black Adam. (Conservative-media opprobrium castigating Superman as “Superwoke” appears to have done little to dampen audience enthusiasm and may have even had the opposite effect.)
According to Scott Mendelson, Puck News’ box-office analyst who also writes the industry newsletter The Outside Scoop, the days when audiences would turn out en masse for a megabudget superhero movie simply because they had been trained to expect a high quotient of entertainment value from these films may be a thing of the past. Although Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine pulled in a whopping $1.3 billion to become the top-grossing R-rated movie of all time last summer, non-sequel, non-reboot comic-book properties just haven’t been scoring in the post-COVID era like they used to. A title like Superman, meanwhile, can break out despite its superhero pedigree rather than because of it. “I think it’s less superhero fatigue than superhero indifference,” says Mendelson. “The films that are events unto themselves — with or without the superhero connection — those are the ones that can still do excellent business.”
Superman is expected to continue flying high at the box office for at least the next few days until it faces direct competition from Marvel’s Fantastic Four: First Steps (July 25), the fourth live-action movie iteration of the classic comic to hit theaters. But given the relative paucity of presumed blockbusters due out later this summer, conventional industry wisdom holds that both superhero titles could keep doing boffo biz through September or even October.
As Bock sees it, Superman’s greatest superpower — at least domestically, if not around the rest of the world — these days may be the movie’s defiantly uncynical take on American heroism. “I actually think that could be its saving grace,” he says. “Look at all the snarky heroes we have, killing people, telling jokes, laughing about it; Deadpool is the epitome of all that. While Superman is as sweet as apple pie. He is Americana. And that’s something it seems like a lot of people wouldn’t mind going back to. It evokes a different place and time. It actually gives Superman an advantage. I think a lot of people may gravitate to Superman because it isn’t cynical.”
