As many predicted, Blue Beetle is not exactly lighting up the box office. In fact, it’s the DCEU’s worst opening weekend ever, outside of Wonder Woman 1984 which was largely a streaming-only release in the pandemic.

Blue Beetle made only $25 million its opening weekend, and $43 million worldwide on a reported $100 million budget. Small-ish for a superhero movie, but that’s still not great.

The frustrating thing is…Blue Beetle is good. It has a solid, “Certified Fresh” 76% Rotten Tomatoes score and a great 92% audience score. That is in fact the highest ever audience score in the DCEU outside of Zack Snyder’s Justice League cut (93%), though Snyder has a vocal legion of online fans who would do things like cast lots of votes for the Rotten Tomatoes audience score.

It doesn’t matter. We’ve seen this before, where James Gunn’s Suicide Squad reviewed excellently, a total reversal from the first film, and it was still considered an underperformer for DC and a box office miss. Then we had Black Adam which did okay, not great, reviewed terribly. Shazam 2, which did extremely bad. And the The Flash, which did not even review all that badly, a 64%, but is one of the biggest bombs in all of box office history, the A-list hero losing at least $200+ million for WB.

Blue Beetle won’t lose that much, it can’t, but it’s another piece of evidence that it doesn’t really matter if DC puts out good or bad content at this point, audiences are just not having it. Ironically, the lone, somewhat recent exception to this is the project decidedly outside of the DCEU/DCU, Matt Reeves’ The Batman, which made $770 million worldwide.

We have gotten a long list of superhero projects coming from James Gunn over the next few years, meant to kick off a new era for DC. While Gunn has proven to be able to make good superhero movies, the current problem with DC is that all these “shared universe” movies have lost audience interest despite their quality. I would expect Superman Legacy to make a lot of money at a big kick-off with a big hero, but after that? I’m not so sure, given the relative obscurity of so many of the projects (how much money do you think “The Authority” is going to make?). And in the interim, I imagine Aquaman 2 is about to take a huge bath compared to its original $1 billion at the box office.

Not that Marvel is doing so hot lately either, but DC is in an absolute spiral. We’ll see if Gunn can right the ship, but I’m not quite seeing the path here right now, based on what we know about what’s coming.

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