A new report has lowered its Superman 2025 box office predictions for its opening weekend. The James Gunn-directed film launches nationwide today, July 11, and it hopes to reboot the DCU with a bang. But while the movie is still expected to dominate the box office for the next two weeks, launch projections have continued to decrease as we have gotten closer to its launch. In fact, the opening weekend predictions for The Fantastic Four: First Steps are now slightly higher than Superman’s. Fortunately, the report gives many reasons for why the new Superman movie may not succeed as much as originally expected.
What are Superman’s opening weekend projections now?
The box office projections for Superman 2025’s opening weekend is $125 million to $150 million, which is roughly a 10% decrease on both its lower and upper predictions.
These new numbers comes from a July 10 report from BoxOfficeTheory, an analytics site that tracks and predicts the box office sales of upcoming movies. To put these figures into context, the site released a report about a month ago on June 6 predicting that Superman 2025 would receive somewhere between $154 million and $185 million. This was then decreased to $135-$175 million in a June 20 report before being lowered yet again in the most recent analysis.
More specifically, the site believes that the movie will rake in $135,350,000 for its three-day weekend forecast. We have to put an asterisk there, though, because the report includes predictions from Thursday, June 10, to Sunday, June 13 (so it’s technically a four-day prediction). For exact numbers, it projects that Superman 2025 will earn $23,900,000 on Thursday (including Amazon Prime Early Access), $37,170,000 on Friday, $39,720,000 on Saturday, and $34,560,000 on Sunday.
The latest report provides many reasons for its reduction for the film’s box office performance. After admitting that its own tracking models “were on the bullish end,” Superman 2025 “has not yet reached levels necessary to say that pre-sales as a singular metric by themselves support the kind of $154 million-plus opening performance we and other sources measured as achievable from before-ticket-on-sale windows last month.” Pre-sales for the movie “are slightly less front-loaded to Thursday previews than other films,” which includes Thunderbolts*, Deadpool & Wolverine, and Thor: Love and Thunder.
The film thus far has been “driven largely by an adult male audience,” but the report aims to account for family and kid appeal, particularly those “outside major metro and coastal areas where DC films tend to perform strongest.” The lack of animated hits this summer is expected to be a boon to the success of Superman 2025, which has not “leaned into darker, brooding tones without much comedy” that past DC films have gone for. This is to say that the live-action Lilo & Stitch, Elio, and How to Train Your Dragon remake are not as dominating as Despicable Me 4 and Inside Out 2 was in 2024. Positive word-of-mouth, as indicated by high review scores from critics and users on Rotten Tomatoes, will help the movie’s momentum too.
However, it notes that Superman 2025 has become a political football after James Gunn said that the film is an immigrant story about America. This could have an impact on sales “across middle America with conservative-leaning fans and parents,” which “is exactly where this film needs to play with above-average appeal to reach higher projections.”
Meanwhile, the site has not changes its box office projections for The Fantastic Four: First Steps in its July 11 report, which “looks to benefit from being the next-on-deck tentpole release following Superman.” Its opening weekend projections remain at $125 to $155 million, which is shockingly higher than Superman’s at this point in time. The current pace for its Thursday domestic review on July 24 is climbing toward $25 million, with critic review embargoes lifting on July 22.
