DC Studios/Warner Bros’ Superman from James Gunn is passing the $300 million mark at the domestic box office today. That’s not the first DC movie to cross that that threshold in years, silly, rather it was three years ago that Matt Reeves’ The Batman also pulled off that box office feat.
Overall, Superman is the ninth DC movie to cross the three century mark at the U.S. Canada box office after 2008’s The Dark Knight ($534.9M), 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises ($448.1M), 2017’s Wonder Woman ($412.8M), 2022’s The Batman ($369.3M), 2015’s The Joker ($335.4M), 2018’s Aquaman ($335.1M), 2016’s Batman v Superman ($330.3M) and 2016’s Suicide Squad ($325.1M).
Superman has surpassed Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel ($291M domestic) and 2017’s Justice League ($229M), the latter co-starring Kal-El.
Superman accomplishes this on its 21st day in theatrical release. The movie is pacing 4% behind The Batman at the same point in time, and it’s 2% ahead of Wonder Woman.
Meanwhile, NEON has opened the Dave Franco-Alison Brie horror movie Together to $2.65M. That includes $1.3M in previews. NEON acquired the Michael Shanks directed and written pic out of Sundance for around $16M worldwide. It’s a body-horror feature about a couple. Outlook for the movie is $8M-$10M over five-days in a marketplace where Fantastic Four: First Steps is expected to do $45M-$47M in its second weekend at No. 1, DreamWorks Animation/Universal’s Bad Guys 2 is looking at $20M and Paramount’s Naked Gun reboot hoping for $15M.
A good comp to Together is Ari Aster’s pre-Covid 2019 movie Midsommar which opened over five days (granted it was July 4th). That movie opened to $3M first day for a $10.9M five-day take, finaling at $27.4M. Together‘s CinemaScore is the same as Midsommar‘s – a C+, but the Shanks title has better Rotten Tomatoes scores at 94% critics/78% audience to Midsommar‘s 83% critics/63% audience.
Back in May, a lawsuit was filed against WME, NEON, Shanks, Franco and Brie that Together was a “blatant rip-off” of Better Half, a 2023 indie written and directed by Patrick Henry Phelan. According to the filing, the script for Better Half was pitched to Franco and Brie in August 2020, when a casting director sent the material to their WME reps and approached them for the lead roles. It’s alleged in the suit that Brie and Franco rejected the offer because “they wanted to produce the film themselves and have WME package the project with one of the agency’s own writers.” Shanks, NEON and WME responded to the lawsuit with the latter two exclaiming, “The plaintiff is doing nothing more than drumming up 15 minutes of fame for a failed project, demonstrated by the fact they contacted the press before filing their lawsuit, and did so without doing the most basic due diligence.” That legal spat hasn’t held up the release of Together.
