The second weekend at the box office was always going to be seen as a big test for James Gunn's Superman. Because of the title character's pop culture prominence, a solid opening at minimum was long expected (as reported last Sunday, it impressed with a $125 million start), but the sophomore Friday-to-Sunday is where a blockbuster shows its real colors: either it proves top heavy and fades fast, or hype and excitement stays strong.
Today, we can report that the first blockbuster from the DC Universe is in the latter category. While it didn't exactly pull off the same magic as Ryan Coogler's Sinners earlier this summer, the numbers are strong enough to generate smiles over at DC Studios today (though there certainly aren't going to be matching countenances reacting to the numbers for Chris Miller's Smurfs and Jennifer Kaitlyn Robinson's I Know What You Did Last Summer). Check out the full Top 10 below and join me after for analysis.
TITLE | WEEKEND GROSS | DOMESTIC GROSS | LW | THTRS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1. Superman | $57,250,000 | $235,033,000 | 1 | 4,275 |
2. Jurassic World: Rebirth | $23,400,000 | $276,184,000 | 2 | 3,854 |
3. I Know What You Did Last Summer* | $13,000,000 | $13,000,000 | N/A | 3,206 |
4. Smurfs* | $11,000,000 | $11,000,000 | N/A | 3,504 |
5. F1 | $9,615,000 | $153,643,000 | 3 | 3,094 |
6. How To Train Your Dragon | $5,350,000 | $250,733,000 | 4 | 2,835 |
7. Eddington* | $4,255,607 | $4,255,607 | N/A | 2,111 |
8. Elio | $2,000,000 | $68,923,095 | 5 | 2,035 |
9. Lilo & Stitch | $1,500,000 | $418,186,676 | 7 | 1,325 |
10. 28 Years Later | $1,340,000 | $68,740,000 | 6 | 1,219 |
Superman Easily Wins The Box Office In Its Second Weekend And Crosses $400 Million Globally
Is a 54 percent weekend-to-weekend drop considered great? Not really. Ideally, a movie wants to be closer to 50 percent than 60 percent, and the DC Studios feature is on the right side of 55, but not by much. What can be said at the very least is that it's a confidence-building showing for the superhero genre, as the change is moderately better than the 56 percent fall by Jake Schreier's Thunderbolts* (a.k.a. New Avengers) in May and far better than the 68 percent sink that we saw Julius Onah's Captain America: Brave New World experience in February.
Superman added $57.3 million to its domestic haul over the last three days (per The Numbers), and that means it has earned $235 million to date. It continues to climb in the US/Canada rankings for 2025, and has already surpassed the total haul made by Captain America: Brave New World (the first Marvel movie of 2025 finished its theatrical run in the region making $200.5 million).
The James Gunn-written-and-directed feature is now ranked as the sixth highest box office earner of 2025 thus far, and it is presently only about $16 million behind Dean DeBlois' live-action remake of How To Train Your Dragon (which, as you can see from the chart, is still playing in wide release and added $5.4 million to its own total this weekend).
At this point, it seems very clear that Superman will ultimately climb to be among the Top 3 releases of 2025 when its time on the big screen comes to an end... but whether or not it will be able to climb any higher than that is not yet clear. If it wants to do that, it will basically have to double its current domestic ticket sales, as the rankings are topped by Jared Hess' A Minecraft Movie ($423.9 million) and Dean Fleischer Camp's Lilo & Stitch ($418.2 million – and still climbing).
The best news of all for Superman this week is apparent when one zooms out from the film's domestic performance and looks at how it is doing around the globe. The movie continues to do better in the United States and Canada than aboard, but the $165.9 million that the movie has made overseas means that the DC Studios blockbuster has become the latest 2025 movie to earn $400 million worldwide.
Superman is only the tenth film to reach that milestone so far in the calendar year, and it will soon pass Captain America: Brave New World in the rankings.
As far as the history of the Last Son Of Krypton on film, it can be said that the new release has now outgrossed Bryan Singer's Superman Returns from 2006 to become the fourth highest grossing title featuring the legendary superhero. Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice still tops the list, having made $874.4 million) during its time in theaters worldwide, and it's followed by Snyder's Man Of Steel ($668 million) and Snyder's Justice League ($661.3 million).
Of course, part of the reason why Superman did as well as it did this weekend is because the competition wasn't exactly overwhelming (more on that in a moment). How the film will perform up against Matt Shakman's Fantastic Four: First Steps – the upcoming Marvel blockbuster targeting the exact same audience – will be the true litmus test for the legs of the James Gunn feature as it hopes to have long-term success through August.
I Know What You Did Last Summer And Smurfs Fail To Distract From Superman's Dominance
If you study the movie release schedule for long enough, you can recognize certain patterns and familiar maneuvers. A classic is competing major studios clearly anticipating a certain blockbuster's success and opting to essentially get out of its way and let that success happen by putting a pair of mid-tier releases in its path.
This is what we saw play out this weekend with Superman, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Smurfs: everyone and their mother knew that Superman was going to repeat at Number One this weekend, and so Paramount and Sony threw their newest titles into theaters with minimal expectations.
Looking at the weekend chart, you'll see that those minimal expectations were reached. As I basically predicted (and hoped against) in the conclusion of my I Know What You Did Last Summer CinemaBlend review, the slasher legacyquel had to settle for third place making $13 million, and the new big screen reboot of Peyo's most famous creation landed behind it making $11 million.
Those aren't particularly good results, but there is notable high potential in the long run: I Know What You Did Last Summer should be ready for the home video market just in time for the start of 2025's spooky season, and the Smurfs movies have always played better overseas than in the United States and Canada (of the $1.1 billion that the four Smurfs films have made worldwide, only $269.7 million has come from the domestic box office).
Looking into the future, I'll be back here on CinemaBlend next Sunday to analyze the big SuperFantastic showdown between Superman and Fantastic Four: First Steps, and the results should be fascinating. It will be a true battle between DC and Marvel, and I'm excited to see how things turn out.
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