Well, Warner Bros. may not be making the greatest superhero movies on the planet, but you can't say they don't make money. While Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice fell short of box office expectations, the same can certainly not be said for Suicide Squad. The final numbers are in, and the heavy critical whiplashing it got didn't seem to keep many people away from the movie theater. Despite featuring a cast of mostly unknown characters, Suicide Squad has made an insane amount of money at the global box office.
According to data from Box Office Mojo, the final tally for Suicide Squad stands at an incredibly impressive $745,600,054. Produced on a budget of $175 million, the film seems to have more than made back what was put into it, though that's without factoring things like advertising and marketing costs, which are usually pretty big. Regardless, it's an impressive achievement for a film that starred a bunch of super villains most audience members had never heard of until a few months ago.
While this number is interesting, Suicide Squad is still only the second highest grossing film in the DC Extended Universe, falling right behind Batman V Superman's $873.3 million. However, that movie is about Batman and Superman, the most well-known superheroes in the world, so its numbers should definitely be higher. Suicide Squad is much more impressive when you're factoring in the fact that it had a character called Captain Boomerang and it still came within a breath of matching BvS. Suicide Squad also didn't play in China, a territory that contributed almost $100 million to Batman v Superman's box office. If Suicide Squad's main baddie wasn't a supernatural goddess thing than this could have been a much different story.
Like every entry in the DCEU so far, Suicide Squad was throttled with negative reviews from critics. The film ended up divisive even amongst fans, with many not connecting to a film they felt was tonally inconsistent. Soon after its release, it came out that Warner Bros. went into panic mode after Dawn of Justice didn't light the world on fire, and wanted Suicide Squad to reflect its more upbeat and popular trailers. At the time, the movie was supposedly much more serious and Warner Bros allegedly hired the company that cut the trailer to edit their own version of the film. The cut then competed against David Ayer's more somber version, with the "fun" one eventually winning. Ayer has since claimed that the version on screen is and has always been his, but one needs only look at the sloppy pacing to know that a lot was left on the cutting room floor.
Whatever your thoughts on the movie, it's still incredible that it did so well at the box office. If any of this has you jonesing for some Suicide Squad, then you can always get the Extended Cut when it hits digitally on November 15 and shelves on December 13.
