By Gavin Boyle
SUPERMAN recently crossed $300 million at the domestic box office, the first DC movie to reach this mark since THE BATMAN in 2022.
“We’ve seen really strong daily holds [for SUPERMAN] and usually that is indicative of word of mouth kicking in, especially on a big film like this that already opened pretty well,” Shawn Robbins, director of analytics at Fandango and founder and owner of Box Office Theory, told CNN after the movie’s second week in theaters.
This trend holds true weeks later as SUPERMAN continues to gross well at the box office. After last weekend, the movie now sits above $300 million domestically and has crossed the $500 million mark worldwide. The success of the movie is certainly a relief for creator James Gunn who is launching the new DC Universe through the story.
“A lot of people think it’s going to be Marvel 2.0, and definitely I learned a lot of stuff at Marvel. I think that we have a lot of differences,” Gunn explained of the new universe in January. “We are telling a big, central story that is like Marvel, except for, I think that we’re a lot more planned out than Marvel from the beginning because we’ve gotten a group of writers together to work that story out completely.”
“But we’re also creating a universe that is like STAR WARS, where there’s different times, different places, different things, or GAME OF THRONES, where characters are a little bit more morally complex,” he continued.
Related: James Gunn Reveals His New Angle on Superman for Upcoming Movie
Gunn has also revealed that not every movie will feel the same. While most Marvel movies and TV shows are clearly inspired by one another, Gunn will allow the directors who work within the DC Universe to impose their own style on the story they tell.
“It’s not like every movie is going to be like SUPERMAN, the original,” he told CBS Mornings. “The artists and the directors and the writers that create each one will bring their own sense to it. Just like I’m looking at all your comics over there. Look at how totally different they look, how different Superman looks, at how these things look different. And so it’s like, that’s what we want to bring to the films, because we don’t want people being bored.”
Bringing freshness to the genre has been the main focus for Gunn who wants to revive the superhero movie after it has failed to deliver returns in theaters for years. While many in Hollywood have moved on from the genre, believing it to be dead, Gunn thinks there is still life yet, as long as filmmakers give their projects the time and effort they deserve.
The success of SUPERMAN proves that Gunn’s theory may be right and DC may be able to successfully relaunch its cinematic universe even as Marvel struggles with its own.
Read Next: DC Studios CEO James Gunn Announces New Projects: ‘Storytelling Is Always King’
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