Unless something goes terribly wrong, Wonder Woman 1984 will almost certainly hold the unwanted distinction of being the DCEU’s lowest-grossing movie for the foreseeable future.
Released at the height of the pandemic’s opening wave, Patty Jenkins’ sequel was the first major blockbuster to be awarded a simultaneous theatrical and HBO Max release, where it wound up earning just $166 million at the box office.
Despite also being a hybrid, this time an R-rated one, James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad fared ever-so-marginally better, bringing in $600,000 more than Gal Gadot’s second solo outing.
The whole thing has been a source of constant scorn and criticism from inside and outside the industry, and in an interview with The LA Times, producer Charles Roven admitted that going day-and-day date with Wonder Woman 1984 was hardly a success, even if it was the best choice from a bunch of bad options at the time.
“Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot and myself were asked if we would support a day-and-date release on Wonder Woman 1984 when we were in the height of COVID, and we had already held the movie for over a year. We were really facing the option of either coming out simultaneous on HBO Max in December of 2020 or waiting until December of 2021.
We agreed to do it. But we were not told that that would be what all of 2021 was going to be like. And I have to say that I think they themselves [Warner Bros.] know that that didn’t work. There’s some pretty great movies, and I think I produced one of the best ones, which was James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. And its box office was minuscule compared to what it did on HBO Max. I think it was a missed opportunity.
That option seems to have gone away, and not just because the filmmakers didn’t like it, but because I think that the studios themselves realize that they were putting a cap on their revenues. No way would “Spider-Man” have been the hit that it is if it had been shared with streaming.”
On the plus side, every single DCEU project from here on out is playing either exclusively on the big screen or on HBO Max, and the coffers will be swelling by the end of 2022. Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam, The Flash, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom are on the way to multiplexes, while Batgirl could draw in plenty of new subscribers for WarnerMedia’s platform.