‘The Suicide Squad’ is a Box Office Disaster!

Well The Suicide Squad is a box office dumpster fire, apparently. It was so bad that Warner Brothers and AMC struck a deal months ago to delay releases onto HBO Max for 45 days while the movies themselves play in theaters.

Wait a second… what?

The AMC Deal

According to THR, Time Warner and AMC struck a deal to delay releasing new movies onto HBO Max for 45 days to allow for a theatrical run. I first stumbled upon this today, thinking Time Warner struck a quick deal with AMC to alleviate the pressure from the very low weekend box office for The Suicide Squad – especially since it did not hit its projected $30 mil for opening weekend.

But if you read the article closely, Time Warner and AMC had been working on negotiating this contract for a few months, well below the uptick in box office due to the increased vaccination rate and lowering spread of COVID during May, June, and most of July.

If you’re new to this, Time Warner decided in 2020 to release all of its 2021 releases simultaneously to stream on HBO Max and be shown in theaters. At the time, Time Warner was considering this to be a permanent move, though they have since walked back and said it was temporary due to the pandemic and Coronavirus (walking back on hard line stances for the betterment of the company is something they have been doing a lot, and it’s a good sign for their continued survival). While many other companies have hoped that they can make a return to big box office numbers, Time Warner was hoping to supplement their losses in the box office with subscriptions to HBO Max, banking on short-term (and inevitable) losses in order to have a long-term subscriber base – similar to a gym membership that people forget to cancel.

Unlike Disney, Time Warner wasn’t going to be greedy by charging a fee on top of the standard subscription rate to allow access (though Disney probably does this more because their service, at the time, was very much underpriced for the value it provided. HBO Max is a good deal more, but it also provides a good deal more content, as Gabe and I have covered in our podcast). This makes it great for people who already subscribe to the highest tier, but it provides a nebulous idea for how much actual money the studio loses on each simultaneous release – tracking eyeball counters to see how successful their movie was instead of box office receipts.

Again, I give Time Warner credit for not letting their hubris get the better of them. They were smart to negotiate a deal for movies being released next year (especially with the Delta variant potentially causing a return to theater closures and has already ravaged the now-no-longer-rebounding box office), hoping the virus will stabilize but also allowing for more box office returns in lieu of attracting new subscribers (I’m sure they are hoping for a fairly stable subscriber count by this time next year and won’t be actively looking to poach their movie returns to bolster their subscriber count).

It’s true – there are some viewing experiences that are just better in the theater. In fact, if a movie is made for theatrical exhibition, it is best to see it there. I sometimes wonder if Austin and my conflicting views of The Suicide Squad comes merely from the fact that I saw it in theaters and he saw it on HBO Max. The sense of dramatic scale watching Lawrence of Arabia is completely abandoned when viewing it on a television unless the television set is 250”, and even then the scale is lost.

(A quick aside – Denis Villeneuve is prepping Dune for theatrical exhibition, saying a lot of the work he and Roger Deakins did on the film would be lost if streamed. The problem I see with the movie is that not enough people will be enticed to go to the movie to see it – after all, Blade Runner 2049 did horribly at the Box Office, and Dune looks even less appealing in most regards. Aside from a PG-13 rating, it suffers from a lot of the same problems that I’ll be talking about in regards to The Suicide Squad as well. I’m wishing for the best for Dune, but I’d be crazy to not expect something like this.)

So let’s get this out of the way – the timing for the announcement from Warner Bros. and AMC was just another kick to James Gunn’s nuts, but aside from the timing of the announcement, The Suicide Squad probably had very little actual influence on its decision making.

Box Office Suicide

So what happened with The Suicide Squad? According to Scott Mendelson, 10 different things (linked below). I agree with some of his points, but others I take issue with. Let’s start with the reasons I think the movie “tanked” (I don’t think it tanked, though I think it was a disappointment).

First, the new surge of COVID due to the delta variant. As soon as the numbers started going up and as soon as Snake Eyes had a somewhat tepid box office, then Jungle Cruise somewhat underperformed, as did Space Jam, it was inevitable that The Suicide Squad would be hamstrung. People are afraid to go out to the theater to watch the movie (especially when they can watch it at home), and they didn’t. I think the amount of fear people have toward it, especially when they look at the logistics of being in a cramped theater with what seems like no clean air, is poison for the box office. If the downward COVID trend continued, we would see much higher returns, guaranteed.

Second, the “R” rating. I minimized this with my friends when I was talking about this, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense that the R rating would be the second largest reason for dull box office returns. According to a 2015 article from The Wrap, an informal study (so take it with a grain of salt) stated that R-rated movies make half as much as either PG-13 and PG movies make on returns on a per-movie average. Even adjusting it to be 3/4, that’s still a huge drop-off in money returns – adding a quarter of the returns for The Suicide Squad put it in good company and well over its current estimate; if we account for half, then it’s a success. The R Rating for the film (well earned, I might add) definitely hurt its box office potential, if just because it meant that it had a narrower audience.

As my last point, I think the movie was targeted too hard core at both the online film community. After Gunn was fired, there was an overwhelming show of support for him (and DC was smart to quickly fire the trigger on him to do The Suicide Squad), and DC was hoping to ride that wave to financial success. The entire marketing campaign basically revolved around the fact that James Gunn was some sort of brilliant film mastermind like Christopher Nolan, hoping to sell the crazy concept of the movie on his name alone. The problem was, the people who would want to see this movie because of the director were already aware of the movie and probably had already bought tickets for it. Additionally, I wonder how many of the people that wanted to see this because of his connection to Guardians of the Galaxy were turned away because they weren’t old enough.

I think the idea to give James Gunn carte blanche on how to proceed was the best idea (even if it ended up costing the studio a ton of money), and I don’t think it’s something Warner Brothers should ever rethink. I think it may have led to issues with the naming – the meme name of The Suicide Squad vs the original Suicide Squad is a fun joke, but it’s not a financially safe joke. I think the name hurting them is grossly out of proportion – I don’t think changing the name would have been enough to recoup a couple million dollars, but I’m also very new to this so I could be crazy.

I also think the Tomb Raider-trap is more of a logical fallacy than an actual curse or trend. In each of the cases listed for the Tomb Raider-trap movies (The Cradle of Life, TMNT: Out of the Shadows, Addams Family Values, The Angry Birds Movie 2), there were a lot of other factors playing into it. For one, The Suicide Squad was released later than any of the others in trap. For another, the film was directed by a much more accomplished (and much more household-named) filmmaker. The critical and audience response was much higher than all the other listed films as well. Unlike the other movies, there was a huge cast turn-around, opting for much more solid actors and showing a turn-around of the previous product than the other movies listed. I think the idea of lumping this into the Tomb Raider trap is more a case of a coincidence than actually being part of some sort of “trap”. It’s an interesting pattern, but I don’t think it is significant in this case. (Though if you think otherwise, please feel free to leave a comment).

I also think the idea that the cast was a failure is also a non-starter and has been grossly overblown. Yes, the movie did not have Will Smith (who I found generic in the first movie). It did not have Batman to an excessive degree. The movie was its own thing and was self-contained. I think the film had an acting upgrade with Idris Elba as Bloodshot, and I think the marketing didn’t do a good job selling him as a main draw of the film. I think audiences are a bit tired of Harley Quinn, yet this movie pushes the Harleyness a lot (though it’s also probably my favorite of Robbie’s performances as Quinn). The rest of the cast are either unknowns or they are more niche character actors. But this wasn’t a problem when Guardians of the Galaxy came out, or with Thor. I think the idea that stars can sell movies is becoming less and less a golden rule, and I think addressing a loss of star power as a reason for failure doesn’t really come close to COVID and the R rating.

I’ll also add that this movie must have been really hard to cut a trailer to. There aren’t many scenes or sequences that escape R-Rated content, and most of the best stuff is the most gory or most irreverent. The fact that Warners was able to cut any semblance of an effective trailer is kudos to them.

Days of Future Past

My hope is that Warner Brothers keeps the faith on this and the movie has legs. I have no real reason to believe this, but if it happens I will be incredibly happy. If anything, this movie is much more like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World – a great creative team with a bunch of stars that were on the cusp of proving if they could carry a big-budget movie, and slowly learning that maybe they can’t. The circumstances for this movie make the whole situation significantly worse (and make the overall box office even more brutal). If it were a different time, we might be hearing different rumblings.

It’s possible that Warner Brothers will take a chance on Gunn like they did on Nolan with Batman – Batman Begins didn’t do amazingly well (it didn’t do amazingly bad), but they trusted him and it paid off in dividends with The Dark Knight. I hope Warner Brothers looks at the critical response, the audience response, adjusts their blinders (due to COVID and having to spend double on marketing what they would have normally spent due to needing to remarket the movie), and see that it’s not all gloom and doom for this hell-bound team.

—————–

Sources:

Pamela McClintock. “Warner Bros., AMC Strike 45-Day Exclusive Theatrical Window Deal for 2022”. The Hollywood Reporter. 98 August 2021. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/warner-bros-commits-to-exclusive-theatrical-release-in-2022-in-new-amc-theatre-deal-1234995035/

Box Office Mojo – The Suicide Squad – https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl84510209/?ref_=bo_hm_RECENT_WEEKEND_WIDGET_1

Forbes – 10 Reasons Why ‘The Suicide Squad’ Is A Box Office Disaster. https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2021/08/08/8-reasons-why-dc-films-suicide-squad-2-starring-idris-elba-and-margot-robbie-was-a-box-office-disaster/?sh=7883874a75e2

Forbes – “Box Office: ‘Suicide Squad 2’ Gets Tomb Raider-Trapped With Poor $12.2M Friday”. https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2021/08/07/the-suicide-squad-box-office-bomb-idris-elba-will-smith-dc-films/?sh=1876a3db177d

Screenrant – Disney’s Lawsuit Proves WB Handled HBO Max Theatrical Releases Right. https://screenrant.com/disney-black-widow-lawsuit-wb-hbo-max-right/

The Wrap – PG-13 vs. R Movies: How Each Rating Stacks Up at the Box Office. https://www.thewrap.com/pg-13-vs-r-movies-how-each-rating-stacks-up-at-the-box-office/