Standalone DC movie The Batman is cleaning up at the box office, having already overtaken Justice League, and possibly setting its sights on Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. Directed by Matt Reeves and starring Robert Pattinson as the titular Caped Crusader, The Batman came into its March 2022 release with lots of expectations for quality. After all, Reeves has directed some great movies, and Pattinson - despite forever being associated with Twilight - has done some terrific acting work in recent years.
Thankfully, The Batman lived up to what most audiences wanted from it, providing a Dark Knight tale just as grim, violent, and literally dark as the trailers advertised. Debates rage over whether The Batman actually bests Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight when it comes to movies starring Bruce Wayne's alter ego, but even those who wouldn't go that far tend to admit that Reeves' effort is quite good. As it stands, a sequel to The Batman already looks likely, and many are actively welcoming it.
Defying expectations for pandemic-era box office, The Batman has so far grossed nearly $700 million worldwide after less than a month in theaters. While The Batman's massive reported budget of nearly $200 million means that profit margin isn't as enormous as one might expect, the movie has still already made money for Warner Bros., and looks on track to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. That haul already puts The Batman ahead of Justice League's $655.9 million worldwide gross, but this doesn't mean that The Batman will stop there.
How Much The Batman Has Made At The Box Office
The Batman burst out of the gate strong at the box office, opening to an impressive $134 million domestically, one of the best openings of the pandemic-era. It remained at #1 on the domestic charts for the next two weeks, only falling to #2 during The Batman's fourth weekend in theaters. The Batman has so far earned $331.9 million domestically, with an additional $340.9 million internationally, for a worldwide current total of $672.8 million.
While The Batman isn't technically a DCEU movie, they still form the best basis for a box office comparison, being recent DC-based releases. At this juncture, The Batman has already passed by Wonder Woman 1984, The Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey, Shazam!, Justice League, and Man of Steel's worldwide DC box office grosses. With the legs The Batman has shown at the box office so far, there's good reason to expect that it will soon surpass Suicide Squad 2016's $745 million total, and probably also Wonder Woman 2017's $818 million gross. That leaves Batman V Superman's $872 million haul as the next big hurdle for The Batman to vault over, although doing so likely won't be easy. On a related note though, The Batman has a hard road to travel to hope of overtaking fellow standalone DC movie Joker, which earned well over $1 billion worldwide. While it's definitely performing well, The Batman reaching the billion-dollar level looks highly unlikely.
Why The Batman's Box Office Beat Justice League
On paper, the massive success of every Avengers movie should illustrate the idea that a superhero movie that features a star-studded team adventure like Justice League will likely outperform a movie featuring only one of those featured heroes. Yet, the case of Justice League, at least the Joss Whedon cut that was released to theaters in 2017, is such a unique one that the general wisdom of a super team being a bigger draw than a solo superhero goes out the window. For one, by the time Justice League was released, many facts about its tumultuous production and numerous rewrites and reshoots had become common knowledge. Naturally, this had many moviegoers already wondering what they might be in for.
While critical response certainly isn't the be-all, end-all metric for how a movie will do financially, the fact that Justice League's reviews were mostly bad only served to further the growing perception that Whedon's film was the messy result of a chaotic shoot. With those perceptions in mind, it's no wonder that Justice League was underwhelming in its opening weekend, and just steadily fell off from there. $655 million might be considered a hit by most standards, but for a blockbuster featuring DC's iconic trinity of major superheroes, it was a colossal disappointment. By contrast, The Batman had good buzz going into release, and followed that with glowing reviews from both fans and critics. Before long, The Batman was clearly the hot ticket at movie theaters everywhere, with continuously positive word of mouth only helping it grow.
Will The Batman's Box Office Beat Batman v Superman?
At this point, it's far from a guarantee that The Batman will overtake Batman V Superman's $872 million box office total by the time it leaves theaters. That would require it to earn an additional $200 million worldwide, which would probably be much easier pre-pandemic, but in 2022 is a tougher proposition. While it's true that Marvel's Spider-Man: No Way Home enjoyed enormous success at the box office, earning nearly $2 billion worldwide, that movie was a truly special event, one akin to an Avengers movie. As praised as The Batman is, it's doubtful most would be inclined to place it above No Way Home on the enjoyment scale, if only for the awe of seeing three Spider-Men work together onscreen.
That said, The Batman definitely has a decent shot of knocking off Batman V Superman from its perch as the third-highest grossing DC movie of the DCEU era, especially if it manages to keep dropping down the charts at such a slow rate. With Morbius looking like a possible disaster in its own right based on advance reviews, The Batman's stiffest competition in the next month will likely come from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. Still, if The Batman can just manage to not drop down more than one to three spots on the domestic charts over the next few weeks, and continue performing well overseas, the ever-controversial Batman V Superman's spot on the DC movie box office rankings could well be in serious jeopardy. Despite all the goodwill surrounding The Batman though, neither Joker nor Aquaman need to worry about losing their respective spots, as the billion mark just seems too far out of reach.
