The more information we get about The Suicide Squad‘s performance at both the box office and on streaming, the bleaker things seem to become, with Mortal Kombat being used as the benchmark. That’s completely understandable when they’re R-rated Warner Bros. reboots of well-known properties aimed at roughly the same target audience, but the video game adaptation has edged ahead on a couple of major counts.
James Gunn’s DCEU blockbuster may have set an R-rated record for an opening weekend during the pandemic era with a $26 million haul, but it was only $3 million above Mortal Kombat, which opened when many more theaters were still closed, not to mention the fact it cost $130 million less to produce.
Not only that, but WarnerMedia touted The Suicide Squad as having the second most-watched debut for a hybrid release behind Simon McQuoid’s martial arts fantasy actioner, and the latest data from Samba TV indicates that there’s a pretty hefty gap between numbers one and two.
As per the third-party aggregator, 2.8 million HBO Max subscribers with Samba TV enabled checked out The Suicide Squad between Friday and Sunday. While that’s not a bad number at all, and it’s much higher than the 1.8 million of Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Wonder Woman 1984‘s 2.2 million, it’s well behind the 3.8 million drawn in by Mortal Kombat.
That’s a hefty 26% drop, even though The Suicide Squad comes boasting some of the DCEU’s best-ever reviews. If somebody had told you this time last month that the movie would have barely beaten Mortal Kombat at the box office and not even managed to come close to its HBO Max viewership, chances are that you wouldn’t have believed them.