‘Suicide Squad’ Opens With An Impressive $135M

Suicide Squad

Suicide Squad

Regardless of the final product and your opinion of it, there’s no denying ‘Suicide Squad’ managed to get a ton of excitement generated beforehand. The marketing was fun, eye-catching, and absolutely relentless, and this weekend, the hype paid off big time. ‘Suicide Squad’ opened to a whopping $135m in the North American box office, obliterating the previous August opening-weekend record holder, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ ($94m).

A wildly impressive number, no doubt, but it’s not all good news. The film was original projected for a $140-150m opening weekend, but while it opened with $65.1m on Friday, it did $38.8m on Saturday, dropping a worrying 40%. It would seem mixed-to-negative word-of-mouth is already doing some damage. Internationally, ‘Suicide Squad’ gathered $132m, bringing the film’s opening weekend worldwide total to $267m. Again, solid numbers, but with reports of the film most likely not getting a release in China, its international revenue may suffer as well.

Now the question is, what happens next? With 26% on Rotten Tomatoes and a B+ CinemaScore (not a terrible grade, but films with A- scores or above tend to hold on longer), the word-of-mouth is not what WB and DC were hoping for. While it bested the opening weekend numbers of ‘Guardians’, it’s unlikely ‘Suicide Squad’ will have the same repeat business of that film.

But for now, let’s try to focus on the positive. This weirder entry in the DCEU centered on obscure DC villains, whose major players include Deadshot, Harley Quinn, and Captain Boomerang, managed to snag over $100m in one weekend. And in August, no less. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a win for the superhero genre.

‘Suicide Squad’ is in theaters now.

Source: Hollywood Reporter

Alan Gunn

Alan Gunn

Cali boy. Disciple of Spider-Man. Still a million bucks shy of being a millionaire.