The effects of the pandemic have made it hard to quantify the success of The Suicide Squad by any of the usual metrics, but James Gunn’s R-rated comic book blockbuster still hasn’t managed to crack $150 million at the box office, which most definitely isn’t a good thing.
Task Force X’s second outing is the lowest-grossing entry in the DCEU to date, and it’s got another $25 million to go before it passes Wonder Woman 1984, a feat that it’s not guaranteed to accomplish by any means. However, the movie has been playing very well on HBO Max since debuting on August 6th, generating more views than Gal Gadot’s solo sequel and Zack Snyder’s Justice League, although it continues to lag behind Mortal Kombat.
As per the data from third-party aggregator Samba TV, The Suicide Squad‘s seventeen-day viewership currently stands at 4.7 million, ahead of Wonder Woman 1984‘s 3.9 million and the Snyder Cut’s 3.2 million. That makes it the third-most watched HBO Max title this year across that timeframe, but it’s significantly down from Mortal Kombat‘s 5.5 million and Godzilla vs. Kong‘s 5.1 million.
While comparing two wildly different projects might be a little unfair, it’s worth considering that The Suicide Squad and Mortal Kombat are both R-rated genre films catered to an almost identical demographic, with Simon McQuoid’s video game adaptation costing $130 million less to produce. Gunn, DC and Warner Bros. remain committed to working together again in the future, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes next once the dust has settled.
