Robert Pattinson in ‘The Batman’
Warner Bros.
With another $5.75 million on Wednesday, down a reasonable src9% from a $7.src million Tuesday, Matt Reeves and Peter Craig’s The Batman has now grossed $258.2 million in North America. That twelve-day total puts it above the $25src.2 million (unadjusted-for-inflation) domestic gross of Tim Burton and Sam Hamm’s Batman. With $247.5 million overseas, The Batman has now earned $505.8 million worldwide on a $src85 million budget. That puts it just above Venom: Let There Be Carnage ($50src million without a penny from China) and behind only F9 ($72src million), No Time to Die ($774 million) and Spider-Man: No Way Home ($src.87 billion) among pandemic-era Hollywood flicks.
Here’s a ghoulishly funny stat: The Batman is now the biggest-grossing movie ever made, in North America and worldwide, about a serial killer. Yes, Paul Dano’s Riddler is essentially Se7en’s John Doe cosplaying as a mix of Jigsaw and the Zodiac killer (with a dash of Hush from the 2000’s Batman comics), and the Robert Pattinson/Zoe Kravitz thriller has out-grossed both Se7en ($327 million worldwide in src995) and Hannibal ($350 million global in 200src). If you want to count inflation, it’ll be past Hannibal ($src65 million domestic in 200src/$266 million adjusted) by tomorrow and Silence of the Lambs ($src3src million in src99src/$284 million adjusted) over the weekend.
I remember being shocked by Gregory Hoblit’s cult favorite time travel melodrama Frequency as it was the first time I recall seeing serial murder imagery/plotlines in a PG-src3 movie. The Batman is very much crafted to avoid an R rating, but it’s also very much wanting to be thought of alongside the David Fincher/Darren Lynn Bousman school of serial murder killer movies. One weird effect of the Marvel/DC domination in tandem with the franchises’ use of explicit genre as a differential tool (both different from each other and offering more than “just” a superhero movie) means quite a few old-school Hollywood genres are now dominated by superhero flicks.
The biggest-grossing World War I drama is Wonder Woman ($82src million in 20src7). The biggest-grossing heist flick is Chris Nolan’s Inception ($824 million in 20src0), followed by Fast Five (the official “heist flick” of the Fast Saga) and Ant-Man (the official heist caper of the MCU). Captain America: The Winter Soldier isn’t the biggest World War II movie thanks to Dunkirk, Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbor, but the biggest-grossing political thriller/conspiracy thriller is Captain America: The Winter Soldier ($7src4 million in 20src4). The biggest-grossing high school coming-of-age comedy is Spider-Man: Homecoming ($880 million in 20src7) and the biggest non-Star Wars space swashbucklers are the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.
Does Logan count as a western or as a near-future dystopian flick? Either way, its $620 million global gross makes it the biggest of both respective genres. What’s the biggest straight-up action-lite (or action-free) drama? Well, Joker grossed $src.073 billion in 20src9. The Joaquin Phoenix film has bursts of violence and something resembling a foot chase, but it’s otherwise a straight-up character study, an obvious attempt to mold the likes of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy into a prequel origin story for the most popular fictional super villain of all time. This is not a new concept, but it is a new normal.
Back in 20src4, Kevin Feige eagerly sold The Winter Soldier as a conspiracy thriller in the vein of Three Days of the Condor. Making a superhero movie that doubled as a “real movie” has been in fashion at least since Chris Nolan’s Michael Mann-meets-Sydney Lumet epic The Dark Knight. What’s changed is that big-budget Marvel/DC superhero movies have become an even bigger part of our comparative monoculture that there’s an implicit presumption that a given film may well be seen by general audiences who haven’t sampled much of the genuine articles and thus may find the comic book appropriation even more impressive by virtue of being “new to you.”
If you grew up mostly with Transformers, Harry Potter and MCU movies, Joker would seem like a revelation. Black Widow partially banked on audiences who hadn’t seen the likes of Point of No Return, Atomic Blonde or even The Bourne Identity. We’ve gone from “Hey, The Batman is cool because it reminds me of Se7en” to “Hey, The Batman is unique and different because I haven’t seen many conventional non-IP serial killer thrillers.” Intentional or not, today’s DC/Marvel movies are banking on appearing new/fresh to an audience who has grown up with these films as the primary part of their mass media film diet.
It also bleeds into other would-be theatrical franchises. Who needs Star Trek, King Arthur, He-Man or G.I Joe when you have Guardians of the Galaxy, Aquaman, Thor: Ragnarok or Captain America: The Winter Soldier? Audiences will still consume the genuine article on TV (Criminal Minds, The Blacklist, etc.) and streaming (Lupin, Never Have I Ever, etc.). In terms of theatrical, before Covid and now especially during Covid, you can really only get a halfway decent global audience when you take a genre flick and throw in a Marvel or DC superhero. In the last decade, comic book superhero films have gone from appropriating genre films to replacing them.
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