If a profitable $618 million Superman isn't a hit, what DC movie will Skydance ever call one?
The new owners fired DC's leadership over numbers that include the studio's biggest film in six years turning a nine-figure profit. Someone should check what the bar is, because the market stopped selling it years ago.
Here is the performance that Skydance's leadership classified as a disappointment. Superman grossed $618.7 million worldwide, drew strong reviews, turned a profit around $125 million, and became DC's biggest theatrical release since Joker in 2019. Per THR's reporting, it nonetheless fell short of the new regime's expectations for returns and cultural impact.
Supergirl, which lost on the order of $125 million, the Skydance side calls "just a disaster" — fine, the numbers agree. The revealing move is filing the profitable record-setter in the same drawer. That's not a verdict on one movie; it's a bar. And the bar deserves a reality check.
The bar against the actual market
Count the comic-book movies that have cleared $618 million worldwide since 2020: Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, The Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Deadpool & Wolverine, Brand New Day. Eight films in six years, and nearly every one carries Spider-Man, the Avengers, or Batman on the marquee.
That's the whole list. The genre's middle class — the $400–600 million zone where The Marvels, The Flash, Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts were supposed to live — collapsed years ago. A first-chapter Superman reboot landing at $618 million with a profit was not a soft result; it was the ceiling of what the 2025 market pays for a non-Spider-Man superhero relaunch.
Since 2019, exactly two DC movies have reached $618 million. The second one got its studio's leadership replaced.
What the bar does to everything after it
Skydance's house standard was set by its own trophies — Top Gun: Maverick at $1.5 billion — and by David Ellison's stated blockbuster instincts. Apply a billion-dollar definition of "hit" to DC's roster and the math turns brutal: Superman and Batman are the only characters with any history of clearing it, and even Superman just demonstrated he can't do it on a first date.
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Which means every other DC property is now pre-failed before a camera rolls. A Wonder Woman movie that makes $550 million misses the bar. A Flash-tier character is unthinkable.
The rational slate under this arithmetic is Superman, Batman, repeat — and when each cycle disappoints against an impossible number, the cycle restarts. Belloni's shorthand for the pattern, DC's "endless reboot," describes exactly what a $618-million-isn't-enough standard guarantees.
Previously we wrote: James Gunn's DC replacement is the Marvel producer who helped hire him for Guardians