‘Suicide Squad’ Premieres to $135M Weekend, Shatters August Box Office Opening Record
DC Comics' long-awaited supervillain-team up film "Suicide Squad" finally premiered last week, opening to overwhelming reaction from fans and moviegoers despite being given an abysmal critical reception.
At its pre-screening for reviewers, David Ayer's entry into the budding DC Extended Universe (DCEU) line of films received a lot of flak from critics. After its first week of life, the film currently has a 40 "mixed or average reviews" on Metacritic and a lower 26% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus indicates that while the film has a stellar cast that gave performances worth their salt, in addition to featuring more humor and acting as a lighter entry in the DCEU, it suffered from poor writing and weak direction.
Contrasting the critical failure however, is the much warmer fan reaction to the film as it continued the trend of DCEU films being given much better initial audience reviews despite being lambasted by reviews. Compared to its low critical scores, the audience and user scores for the film are higher with Metacritic's user score sitting at a 6.8 "generally favorable reviews" while Rotten Tomatoes' audience score indicates that 73% of the voters liked it.
A bigger and clearer indication of the jarring dissonance between "Suicide Squad's" critical and audience reception is the movie's performance in ticket sales. According to Box Office Mojo, the movie's opening weekend ended with a record breaking $135.1 million in domestic gross.
The film's opening weekend performance is record breaking as reports indicate that it now holds the crown for the highest domestic box office opening weekend in the month of August, surpassing 2014's similar misfit ensemble movie "Guardians of the Galaxy." Interestingly, "Guardians of the Galaxy" also belongs to DC rival Marvel and is part of the still-strong Marvel Cinematic Universe, so this could be considered as a win for DC in the superhero films race.
Adding to its performance overseas of $132 million, "Suicide Squad" has already made $267.1 million in its opening week alone; meaning that the film has already recouped its $175 million budget and does not need much more to be considered a financial success.
"Suicide Squad" does not look set to keep going strong however, as its performance in the days following its Aug. 5 opening indicates that audience interest is quickly dwindling. Looking at the film's daily performance, "Suicide Squad" opened to an impressive $65.2 million in its premiere day only to garner barely half of that come Saturday, Aug. 6 with a mere $38.8 million. Sunday's performance continued the drop with and even lower $31 million in ticket sales.
If the film's daily performance keeps going down, then "Suicide Squad" might end up continuing the "front-loaded blockbuster" trend after March's "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," which will not bode well for the DCEU as a whole.