After BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE failed to get Warner Bros. into the $1 billion worldwide box office club, it was a foregone conclusion that they really needed JUSTICE LEAGUE to hit that mark. However, this will be an even harder / risky goal to achieve after a new report from The Wall Street Journal states the production budget for JUSTICE LEAGUE is at $300 million (and maybe even a bit more). This is including re-writes and reshoots done by Joss Whedon, after director Zack Snyder left the project due to family tragedy earlier this year.
A production budget this high — only PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES is more with a $378M budget, but it went on to hit the $1B mark — the pressure is certainly on for JUSTICE LEAGUE to perform, and perform big. There cannot be a huge second weekend drop off in box office ticket sales, like the 69-percent drop by BATMAN V. SUPERMAN in its second weekend of release.
No matter how critics react to the movie, JUSTICE LEAGUE needs a strong word-of-mouth reaction by the fans in a similar way to how moviegoers reacted to WONDER WOMAN over the summer. A strong word-of-mouth can propel a movie toward long term box office success more than bad reviews can hurt a movie. People have gone to the theater to see bad movies since the movie industry began; if it is a bad movie, they won't talk positively about it or encourage others to go and see it which is not what studios want. They want people to tell others to go and to go see it a second time, too.
Such a huge production budget is only part of the cost of making a film this big; there is also the marketing budget. Bottom line, JUSTICE LEAGUE needs to open big and it needs to maintain its status a the movie to see through the Thanksgiving holiday as well as through the holiday season leading up to mid-December before STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI will own the worldwide box office for weeks in a row.
JUSTICE LEAGUE releases on November 17.
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