Box Office: 'Justice League' Climbs To $481M Worldwide

In terms of Justice League box office over the holiday weekend, this may read like that Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment “Clown Without Pity.” In other words, with or without cursed frogurt, there’s a bit of good news and bad news in terms of the second Fri-Sun frame, both in terms of raw numbers and the size of the drop.

So, Justice League earned $40.7 million in its second weekend of domestic release, or about equal to the second weekends of Man of Steel and Suicide Squad (that’s bad). But it fell just 57% in its second weekend, well below the 67-69% drops for Man of Steel Batman V Superman and Suicide Squad (that’s good). But it fell a lot more, even with a holiday weekend, than the 43% drop for Wonder Woman or all-but eight of the 17 MCU movies (that’s bad).

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That second-weekend drop was a lot less than the 60-70% drops for the various Twilight movies and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I (that’s good). But said drop was right in line with the Hunger Games sequels despite much larger opening numbers (that’s bad). With $172m in ten days, it’s still 9% ahead of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (that’s good).

But among non-YA fantasy movies that opened over the pre-Thanksgiving weekend at least since 1989, it’s the second biggest drop after the 59% drop for Mortal Kombat: Annihilation back in 1997 (that’s bad). With $481.3 million worldwide, it’s still essentially doubling its domestic take overseas (that’s good). But its global total is not that much more than the $425m that Batman v Superman earned in its worldwide opening weekend and its $171m ten-day total is still just over/under the opening weekends of Batman v Superman, The Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Iron Man 3 and Captain America: Civil War (that’s bad).

So, yes, the initial plan to use the Thanksgiving weekend to offset the second weekend drop is a relative success. Had we been dealing with an opening weekend closer to Suicide Squad than Logan, I would argue that the movie would be firing on all cylinders. Yes, a kid-friendly sleeper like Wonder isn’t helping in the least, but a movie like Justice League is supposed to be “the danger” no matter what else is out there. General audiences seem to be enjoying the Zack Snyder/Joss Whedon picture, but the overall numbers still imply that a lot of folks jumped ship after Suicide Squad.

This all suggests that Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman was a unique event unto itself as opposed to a reaffirmation of faith in DC Films. The good news about that is that since the next handful of DC Films offerings are going to be more stand-alone in nature (Aquaman, Wonder Woman 2, Shazam, etc.), each new film looks good, gets good reviews and builds solid pre-release buzz, then it likely can stand on its own sans the baggage of the first Man of Steel trilogy weighing it down. Or, conversely, Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. can stop reshooting/recutting these things to the point where the budget is so big that a $600 million+ worldwide total is cause for alarm.

At a glance, if Justice League continues to play somewhere between Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part I and Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the film may just flirt with $250 million domestic, or about what Tim Burton’s Batman earned back in 1989. It’s clearly holding better than a Twilight sequel, so $225m now seems like the floor. It’s clearly pulling a larger percentage of its global box office overseas compared to The Dark Knight or Wonder Woman, so the absolute doomsday scenario isn’t quite coming to pass and the film could still snag a $650m+ global total.

The film is doing a lot better overseas, with a $309.8 million overseas total thus far. So, yeah, it’s currently running 35/65 in terms of domestic/overseas splits, which is where it wants to be if it can keep up the legs for at least the next two weeks. The film has earned $481.3m globally thus far, meaning it should top $500m sometime this week. Justice League is still alive, but it’s not yet well. It held up just well enough to give a little hope for the next two weeks, but not well enough for anyone to pop the champagne.