Is Superman 2025 a Box Office Success or Failure?

The question of whether Superman 2025 is a box office success or failure is actually complicated. The reboot from director James Gunn is looking to be the most successful superhero film in 2025 above The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Thunderbolts*, and Captain America: Brave New World. From that perspective, DC has bragging rights over Marvel so far, which is not necessarily something that fans and analysts would have expected coming into this year. However, there are some box office numbers suggesting that the movie won’t be performing as well as originally expected. Here’s what the long-range forecast looks like for Superman 2025 for its total global box office run.

Will Superman 2025 be a hit or flop?

Current box office projections for Superman 2025 indicate that the movie will probably break even, though that depends on what the actual production budget and marketing costs were for the film.

As of August 13, Superman 2025 has earned a total of $581 million at the global box office after being in theaters for roughly five weeks as noted by Box Office Mojo, with $332 million coming from domestic theaters in the US and Canada and $248 million coming internationally. In its fifth weekend from August 8 to 10, per Variety, the film earned an extra $7.8 million domestically and $5.8 million internationally. These numbers are expected to continue to taper off, with a handful of territories overseas like China having already taken the movie off many of its screens. It’s expected that the film will remain in theaters for an additional month or two until we can finally tabulate what its box office performance will be worldwide.

The tough part is figuring out the context of the $581 million figure. We previously reported in June that an insider of the film said that Superman will would return a profit at the box office as long as it “grosses anything north of $500 million,” though it will “need to gross closer to $700 million to be considered a hit” as far as public opinion is concerned.

We’ve used this benchmark to determine how well Superman 2025 was tracking at the box office, though it should be noted that James Gunn believe that these projections are overblown. In an interview with GQ Magazine, he said that people “hear these numbers that the movie’s only going to be successful if it makes 700 million or something, and it’s complete and utter nonsense.” The director might have been giving himself some wiggle room here, in case the movie doesn’t reach that mark.

A late July report from Top Film Magazine also tells a different story. It believed that the $500 million break-even point was rather low, saying that Superman 2025 will “need around $650 million globally for the film to break even.” This is considering that the production budget for the film is reportedly $225 million and that marketing costs were around $100-150 million.

More than that, it said industry experts projected that the movie would make somewhere between $600 million and $650 million worldwide, with the most “likely” forecast heading toward $625 million. If this true, then by its own analysis, the film would be considered a flop by definition as it will have fallen short of being profitable by $25 million.

However, if the actual break-even point is around the $500 million mark as noted earlier, then it’s a technically financial success. That might not be the full-blown hit that Disney and Marvel wanted, but given the flops that were Joker: Folie à Deux, The Flash, and Shazam 2, this is the reset that they need to give the rest of the James Gunn DCU movies a fighting chance moving forward.