>>213312847Because you don’t understand how the box office works. First of all the production budget was reported as 225 million dollars. Its marketing budget has been reported as anywhere between 125 million to 175+ million.
At the box office it has made 302m domestic and 225m international. When you look at what the studio takes home (60% domestic and 20-40% international) that gives them 226.2-272.1 million dollars against a budget of 350-400+ million dollars. That means this movie is anywhere from 78-174 million dollars in the red.
Now, this movie could be even further in the red. In documents they filed with Ohio, the production budget (not including marketing) was reported as 363 million dollars. DC claims that tax breaks and incentives brought it down to 225m.
But if they’re lying and doing some hollywood accounting this movie could have lost even more money.
Finally, this movie began production in June 2023. You could have taken the 350-400+ million dollars they spent and the other 138 million dollars they spent but claim to have gotten back from incentives and breaks, invested it into the S and P, and be up 244m-269m dollars or more. So not only are they down 78-174m, they missed out on a further 244m-269m, so when you factor in opportunity costs they’re down 322m-443+ million dollars. If they never made this movie they’d have 322-443+ more million dollars than they do now. That’s not being made up for by merchandising and streaming. How was this not a flop?