With plans of a Justice League movie in the future, DC is banking on their first big non-Batman/Superman movie to make money at the box office. Early reviews for the film are overwhelmingly negative and this could potentially derail GL’s money making ability. However, it is not unheard of for bad comic book movies to make money. This got me thinking and I took a look back historically at the quality of comic book movies and their profits.
Before you crucify me for it, let me explain my ranking of ‘quality’. This might not be popular but I am going to use a movie’s rating on rotten tomatoes. These ratings have aggregated many different people’s views on a movie and put it into one quantifiable number. It may not be perfect, and I may not personally agree with all of the ratings, but overall I think that these provide a general ballpark of how good or bad a film was. For comparison’s sake, GL’s current rating on rotten tomatoes is 24%.
As you can see, as a general rule, the better your film is; the better chance it has of making money. The films that have been really good, The Dark Night, Spider-man 2, and Iron Man all have rating over 90% and have made a combined $1.8 million in profits. These movies get all of the comic book fans out for multiple viewings and draws in a huge amount of the general public.
There are some films that go against this grain though. Some films that are quite good don’t end up making money. Take Scott Pilgram for example. A very good movie that did not make any money. Or the Hellboy series, both good movies that did not make money at the proportionate quality-to-profits ratios at the other on this list. These movies, despite their quality, never quite make it onto the public radar and sometimes do not even bring in all of the comicbook fans out there. These characters are relatively unknown to the general public and were not able generate huge profits.
There are many movies that go against the trend the other way. Movies that are not very good, but for a number of reasons manage to still make a lot of money. The best example of these types of movies is X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Spider-man 3. Both of these movies were disliked by critics and fans but still managed to make a lot of money. They were recognisable characters with the general public and people were drawn to these movies regardless of the films quality.
With many of these films, most of the people on this site and others like it are going to go see them regardless of quality, because all of the characters are recognisable to us and we are fans of them. We are almost a guaranteed audience, and I am very okay with that. As long as they keep making movies based on these characters I am going to go see them. However, if they want to make a lot more money, they have to get the general public out, as this audience is going to differ based on the quality of the film and the recognition and fan base of the character.
How does Green Lantern fare under these circumstances? The film, (which I have not seen yet) does not appear to be very good based on the RT scale. So the chances of it making a huge amount of money are limited, as the general public will not be going in huge numbers due to negative word of mouth. GL has a limited built-in fanbase. Green Lantern has never been in a feature film before and has not been in any previous live-action form. He has many comic book fans who will be seeing the movie regardless of its quality due their regard for the character, however, I do not think he is very-well known to the general public. However, WB has done an excellent job of marketing this film all across multiple forms of media. This may have made him a familiar enough face across the world and built up enough anticipation to overcome the negative reviews.
As of Saturday morning, the film had made 21.6 million on Monday and was on pace to make $57 million over the weekend (as per boxofficemojo.com). So the marketing campaign may have been enough to make this film some profit, but I doubt we will see it making huge numbers.
Looking back, history has shown us that some movies that aren’t great still manage to make some money. But overall, the better you make your film, the more money it will make you. I hope Green Lantern does well enough to warrant a sequel and an expanded DC film universe. But I also hope its underwhelming success serves as a lesson to studios that you have an opportunity to make a lot more money if you make a higher quality movie, and then we all win; fans and studios alike.
Gandalf