Brace yourselves. The hot takes about Superman’s box office numbers are coming.

A $122 million domestic opening weekend with a $217 million worldwide opening would be cause for celebration. In the case of James Gunn and WBD CEO David Zaslav, it was. They said so on social media.

The box office experts on social media beg to differ, though, as they love to do with DC movies, and now in the past year or so, Marvel movies as well. According to them, the fact that Superman didn’t outgross Man of Steel’s opening weekend coupled with smaller than expected opening weekend numbers overseas means that even though the DCU may be off to a good start, it’s not lighting anything on fire because DC still needs to earn back the trust of the general audience for the disappointment of the DCEU.

Then you have the Snyder Cultists, who are already priming their “rejection” takes, with one piece of work already saying, “you got your baby movie & the world rejected it.”

They’re both wrong, at least when it comes to the factual statements.

For starters, DC as a brand hasn’t lost any trust with the general audience because the general audience still largely doesn’t know or care about the difference between DC and Marvel on the big screen. Fans keep acting like they want to doubt this, but how many of them are brave enough to ask their parents and relatives, who are part of the normie crowd, who is part of the Avengers and who is part of the Justice League? How badly do you want to risk your brain short-circuiting when your mom asks why Batman doesn’t take over for Iron Man, since he’s dead now in the MCU, or why Spider-Man didn’t help the Justice League take down Steppenwolf in the DCEU? You already know they have no idea what MCU or DCEU stands for.

If the general audience still treats superhero movies as one big genre, then there’s no brand repair that DC needs to deal with. If anything, the bigger issues that DC Studios may have actually to deal with is the perceived superhero movie fatigue thanks to Marvel Studios flooding the marketplace with 36 films since 2008 and 13 shows since 2021, and the nearly generational perception that Superman, despite his popularity over the years, is boring, overpowered and unrelatable as a character.

The funny thing is, if you’ve watched Superman, then you can see where James Gunn took all of those complaints into account and built a movie to attack every one of them. Still, it’s arguably the FIRST Superman movie to do that in such a manner for the general audience at large.

If DC were such a poisoned brand for the general audience, then Superman wouldn’t have even outgrossed the opening weekends for Captain America: Brave New World or Thunderbolts* and yet it did in both cases, and if you’re attributing that to “inflated hype” from the marketing, then you should ask why Marvel didn’t do the same thing for Brave New World and Thunderbolts* respectively? DC Studios did its job of marketing Superman extremely effectively, like a studio should. Like Marvel Studios has done many times before.

Which brings us to the notion that Superman’s opening weekend is somehow a rejection of the movie because it’s less than Man of Steel’s opening weekend. In no reality is $122 million domestically and $217 million globally a rejection of anything except “get woke, go broke” and “Restore the SnyderVerse.” That kind of money in one weekend is what happens when an audience essentially bought into the hype and showed up first in line, objectively so. Ignoring or dismissing that is illogical and borderline delusional in many cases.

If you want to argue it, then we can bring up how different audiences are now post-2020 than they were in June of 2013, we can inform you that Superman is the first solo Superman film in twelve years SINCE Man of Steel, and we can remind you that even though Man of Steel is the highest grossing Superman film of all time, the character has still never made a billion dollars on his own, or even in a team-up for that matter. Hence, any expectation close to that number for Superman is highly illogical and frankly impractical.

Let’s be real, though. None of the box office experts on social media are interested in logic. They all have their narratives, and they’re sticking to them, whatever side of the fence they might be on. Either Superman is an underperforming decent start for the DCU, or it’s an overwhelming rejection of a lighter take on Superman because it can’t even earn the same money as Man of Steel, and no amount of context, nuance, or factual information will dissuade those “experts” from considering the truth.

That includes the ultimate truth that both James Gunn and David Zaslav publicly declared after the opening weekend numbers posted: The DCU is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

First, Zaslav posted his missive calling Superman a “first step” and reiterating his commitment to Gunn and Peter Safran’s ten-year plan for the DCU, which includes Supergirl and Clayface both releasing in 2026. Then Gunn posted his statement that he is “incredibly grateful for your enthusiasm and kind words over the past few days.”

Whatever you think of either Zaslav or Gunn, there is an understanding between the two as well as Safran, and the only ones that truly know what Superman needs to make at the box office for the DCU to remain solid is the three of them, which also means that when Gunn flat out states that the movie doesn’t need to make $700 million to be successful, take him seriously and at his word for that since his boss has arguably no other choice.

DC Studios is the home of WBD’s most significant and most critical IP. Any success that Zaslav wants to have with WBD lies heavily on the DCU succeeding as much as it possibly can, so while his history of writing off things like Batgirl is still deep in the fan consciousness, it’s still in his best interests to stay out of the way of Gunn and Safran as they build their plan out for the next decade.

That’s all that should matter to us fans concerning the box office. Whether or not we get sequels and other films in the franchise. If the answer is yes, and it objectively is at this point, then how much money Superman ultimately makes is irrelevant at this point, so all the arguments, predictions, and opinionated narratives about what it needs to make or what it’s not making are just more noise in the grand scheme of things.