The future of the SnyderVerse is still being widely discussed, debated and dissected online, but WarnerMedia may have hammered another nail into the coffin after releasing a new promo for Zack Snyder’s Justice League that calls it the ‘trilogy trailer.’ While this is hardly earth-shattering news when the boardroom have publicly reiterated on many occasions that the HBO Max exclusive was the end of the filmmaker’s association with DC Films, it does affect the pervasive theories circulating over the last few weeks that the streaming service could end up resurrecting it.
The company’s hierarchy is so muddled that even if HBO Max wanted to produce a Justice League sequel or Ben Affleck’s The Batman for instance, they’d need the approval of several key executives to make it happen. Indeed, AT&T own WarnerMedia, which owns Warner Bros. Pictures, of which DC Films is a subsidiary. So, much like the DCEU’s canon, the corporate structure is a mess.
What’ll happen from here remains to be seen, but a new report is now claiming that one of the key reasons why WB want to leave the SnyderVerse behind is because many inside the studio walls view the entire thing as a huge failure, and they’ve got a point to an extent. Looking at Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and both versions of Justice League, the profit margins have been very thin given the huge investment made.
From start to finish the budget of Justice League was at least $370 million, and it didn’t make WB a single cent, and that’s without even factoring in marketing or promotional costs. Meanwhile, Batman v Superman turned a profit of just over $105 million, while Man of Steel only ended up in the black to the tune of $42 million once all expenses were accounted for. Looking at the SnyderVerse trilogy alone, that’s at least $880 million in production costs with less than $150 million in net profit to show for it, which doesn’t make for particularly encouraging reading, especially when you consider that Shazam! on its own made a net profit of $74 million on a $100 million budget.
