Having barely scraped past the lifetime gross of Shazam!, fellow DC tentpole Black Adam might be flaming out at the box office. A new Variety report estimates that the big-budget superhero film might lose money for Warner Bros.
That would’ve been a massive blow at any other time as well, but under current circumstances — Black Adam was supposed to usher in a new era for the troubled franchise — it feels particularly cruel. The film has made around $387 million at the global box office so far — $165 million of that total came from domestic theaters — but cost a whopping $195 million to produce.
The break-even point was earlier estimated to be $600 million, but the Variety report cites studio sources as saying that the film will break even after passing $400 million worldwide. That's uncertain, too, considering just how majorly the movie was impacted by the arrival of Marvel's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. With Avatar: The Way of Water lurking in the shadows, Black Adam will have to pull out all the stops as it attempts to save face by touching $400 million globally. Sources cited in the report also dispute claims that $100 million was spent on marketing the movie, and peg the figure slightly lower, at around $80 million.
The rule-of-thumb is simple: a movie needs to make twice its budget (including the marketing spend) in theaters in order to break even because half the gross goes to theaters. Black Adam will ultimately fall short of Justice League’s disappointing $655 million global haul, and it has zero chances of coming close to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice ($872 million worldwide), Wonder Woman ($817 million worldwide), and Suicide Squad ($745 million worldwide). The top DCEU film remains Aquaman, which made $1.1 billion globally.
In addition to the disappointing result for W.B., the film also marks a rare box office failure for Dwayne Johnson, Perhaps among the last remaining stars who can open a movie, Johnson put all his marketing might behind Black Adam, a film that he has been attached to for over a decade. While the movie delivered a personal-best stateside debut for Johnson ($67 million), it will ultimately fall way short of the star’s biggest films. Even his moderate hits — Rampage and San Andreas — performed better globally. Variety estimates that the movie will probably pick up an additional $25 million to $35 million on PVOD before debuting on the HBO Max streaming service, but that isn’t good enough either.
Black Adam is performing along the lines of another W.B. bomb from earlier this year: Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. That film might have killed its franchise, but it remains to be seen how Black Adam’s box office failure impacts the DCEU under the new leadership of co-CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran. Upcoming films in the franchise include Shazam! Fury of the Gods, The Flash, Blue Beetle, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.
You can watch our interview with Johnson here, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.