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SuaveSocialist on 22 May 2016
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Lawlight said:
SuaveSocialist said:

Indeed they are.  It's on pace to outdo Winter Soldier by 344M, which in turn outpaced First Avenger by 344M.  They managed to turn a franchise around from a film that lagged behind Superman Returns to a contender for a place among the coveted Top Ten Grossing Movies of All Time.  

Any expectations it would be competing against the Avengers would have been completely misplaced considering that

1) The original plan was to compete head to head against Battle v Superman, but DC recognized a stinker when they saw one and rushed the opening release by about 2 months to avoid a box office bomb.  The division of audiences would have resulted in Civil War performing lower than it currently achieves---and initially there was expectation to be directly challenging X-Men: Apocalypse even sooner.  Optimistically speaking, Captain America would only haul about 800M (though BvS would have likely only taken 500-650M).

2) It was released in 20 fewer territories and had less of an advertising push than Age of Ultron, by itself rendering it inevitable to fall short of this.

3) The Chinese government frowns on anything with "America" in the title, so the execs knew right from the moment they called this movie "Captain America" and not "The Avengers" that they were going to be alienating a sizable portion of the largest Foreign territory.

In my opinion, they aren't. 

The original plan was to compete head to head against Battle v Superman, but DC recognized a stinker when they saw one and rushed the opening release by about 2 months to avoid a box office bomb.  The division of audiences would have resulted in Civil War performing lower than it currently achieves---and initially there was expectation to be directly challenging X-Men: Apocalypse even sooner.  Optimistically speaking, Captain America would only haul about 800M (though BvS would have likely only taken 500-650M).

Heck, they didn't even decide to go with the Civil War story until BvS was announced; the whole thing from its inception was a response to DC.  And Disney won in every category.  War is over.

If they aren't the sorts to be happy with 1B, they wouldn't have been the sorts who were willing to divide their audience against BvS and X-Men.  Balance of probabilities.  DC slinking away resulted in an unexpected surplus of hundreds of millions.  Competing with Avengers was never part of their agenda, and you don't need an internal source to deduce this.  Their marketing strategy and choice of release date are wildly inconsistent with that of Avengers, Age of Ultron and anyone who'd want to compete against them.

BvS on the other hand?  Well, one would have to be experiencing severe Cognitive Dissonance to think the folks behind that mess are in a better mood than the folks at Disney.