How Has Blue Beetle Done?

Alongside the DCEU film The Flash Warner Bros. Discovery had another superhero film coming out this summer, Blue Beetle. It hit theaters in North America in August 18--and six weeks on has collected some $70 million. It has taken in an additional $53 million internationally at last check.

This works out to a grand total of $123 million.

This is, admittedly, a bit better than may have been anticipated for it--the North American component of the gross, indeed, exceeding the high end of Boxoffice Pro's mid-July expectations ($55 million). However, it is a long way from making the $100 million+ film profitable, even if one assumes commensurately strong earnings in streaming and other post-theatrical distribution--and thus also a long way from justifying the decision to "upgrade" what had originally been a straight-to-streaming project to a bigger budget and a theatrical release.

Notably this is in spite of the film seeming to be actually well-liked--rather better-liked, in fact, than the far more expensive and heavily promoted The Flash, to go by the Rotten Tomatoes scores (a critics' score of 79 vs. 63 for The Flash, an audience score of 92 vs. 83 for the other movie).

It seems at the very least more evidence of the difficulty of getting audiences to buy tickets generally--and the difficulty of getting them to do so in particular for superhero movies, especially as those features of a superhero film that may make it stand out are, alas, not the kind of thing that tidily fits into high concept marketing schemes.