Monday finds a lot of critics and more than a few nerds in shock. After a year of the latter insisting that Man of Steel was terrible and nobody wanted to see a followup, and the former soundly thrashing it, it beat tracking estimates by $30 million in the U.S. to land $170 million, and it beat the overall international tracking by $70 million to gross $420 million. It will trigger a lot of discussion about whether critics “matter,” but the reality is that it’s less about whether critics matter and more about understanding what audiences want.
The usual response is that “Critics have never mattered,” but they do. Using Rotten Tomatoes as a guide, movies that make more than $150 million at the box office almost always get at least a bare majority of critics, 60 percent or so, on their side, and Batman V. Superman hasn’t even kissed 45 percent on the site. This is completely unprecedented, unless you paid attention to Man of Steel, which got a critical drubbing and went on to outgross most of what Marvel had put out by June 2013 anyway. Only Iron Man 3 and The Avengers beat out Supes, and this was a character coming off a disastrous attempt to relaunch him and which had the stench of Green Lantern bombing lingering over the studio to boot.
To offer a half-baked theory, there’s a sort of reverse halo effect at work. Just like nerds railing about unsaved civilians and how Superman never ever kills didn’t ultimately matter a bit to Man of Steel, the griping about Batman V. Superman from nerds made it sound like Batman & Robin V. Superman IV, driving down audience expectations to more or less a poop emoji of a movie. When the audience ended up with a movie that has actual good bits to it, it’s pretty easy for people who liked what they saw to spin that as nerds being giant crybabies and critics being bitter elitists.
If anything, social media pitched in. Building up to Batman V. Superman coming out, I saw a lot of gloating on Twitter about bad Rotten Tomatoes scores and people sharing hyperbolically bad reviews from critics. The comments sections on nerd blogs filled up with predictions ranging from $100 million max at the box office to absolute doom. They’d been insisting the movie must be bad for years, and therefore it had to bomb, right?
And the thing is, they might have been right not so long ago. But we literally just wrapped up a lovefest for a $60 million movie starring a superhero only nerds cared about, and it was rated R to boot. Deadpool, according to every scrap of conventional Hollywood wisdom, should have been a cult flick. Instead it was a phenomenon. You can’t chalk that up entirely to Deadpool being a superhero flick. Fox conducted a careful, smart, and lengthy marketing campaign based around viral gags so audiences knew what to make of the Merc with a Mouth. But realistically it shouldn’t have mattered, because Only Nerds Like Comic Book Movies, right?
Apparently not. If I’m being honest, I don’t think Batman V. Superman is going to ultimately outgross, say, any of Nolan’s Batman movies. Hyperbole aside, it’s got a lot of problems as a movie and audiences didn’t exactly love it either, even if they liked it more than the critics. But I think its success despite the enormous negative buzz from what was supposed to be its biggest audience signals a sea change in superhero movies. If we couldn’t argue before that superhero movies were mainstream, and what nerds want from them didn’t matter, we’ve got about $420 million worth of reasons to believe it now.
