| spurgeonryan said: Box office mojo thought it would hit 93 million, so that is good. 100 plus million is never something to ignore. Sadly their budget was crazy. |
Actually, Box Office Mojo was expecting an opening of $118 million. So the film performed well below (about $20 million under) Box Office Mojo's (and the entire industry's) expectations:
'Justice League' is Coming Together for $110+ Million Opening
Looking at a #1 finish, Warner Bros. and DC Comics' Justice League will debut in 4,051 theaters with industry expectations right around $105-115 million. Given Wonder Woman debuted with $103.2 million earlier this year, Suicide Squad opened with $133.6 million last year and Batman v Superman opened with $166 million, those expectations might seem low given this is essentially DC's equivalent to Marvel's The Avengers. While that is true, the DC Extended Universe has taken something of a different path than the Marvel franchise, playing it big almost from the start by bringing Batman and Superman together and introducing Wonder Woman in Batman v Superman immediately after Man of Steel, followed that same year by the anti-hero feature Suicide Squad. As such, while these expectations appear a little low, they aren't entirely unreasonable.
Looking at IMDb page view performance, Justice League is pacing just ahead of Wonder Woman at the same point in the release cycle and well behind both Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad. And if you take the average opening for a film of this type from Warner Bros., debuting in this many theaters, you only get a ~$95 million opening. That said, based on IMDb page view performance Justice League is over-indexing, leading us to believe an opening no lower than $115 million is likely.
Not helping matters, reviews for Justice League are only marginally better than those for Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, as it currently holds a Metacritic score of 47. There has also been a bit of controversy surrounding the suppression of the film's RottenTomatoes score, but just as previous films didn't perform entirely well with critics, their opening weekends appear critic-proof and that should be the case again here. How it plays beyond opening weekend is another matter.
All told, we're anticipating an opening around $118 million or higher for Justice League.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=4345&p=.htm
