Superman’s real-life kryptonite: The incredible shrinking cinema business

There’s a new Superman movie in theatres this week and business is, as they say, boffo! “Superman soars to $[US]122 million, third-biggest box office opening weekend of 2025,” raved Variety, referring to ticket sales in the United States and Canada. (In Australia, the film brought in $8.13 million for the weekend.) If you follow box-office news, it’s all very normal: big bucks, records broken, blah blah blah.

But there is one thing in Hollywood that’s rarer than a substantive movie role for a female actor over 40, and that’s the disclosure of the actual number of tickets a particular film sells on a particular weekend in a box-office report.

How high is he really flying? David Corenswet as the latest incarnation of Superman. Credit: Warner Bros.

That number can lead you into an alternative reality worthy of a David Lynch film. It also explains why going to the movies is so freaking irritating these days.

Now, $US122 million ($187 million) might seem like a respectable haul for an opening weekend. However, if you look up the average cost of a movie ticket in the US, which is $US11 and change, and then do a little maths, you get the number of actual tickets that Superman sold: About 11 million. (The number is actually a lot lower; those big-franchise films get a disproportionate share of their incomes from high-priced Imax showings and the like, but that’s another story.)

Let’s flash back to the last big Superman movie, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, in 2016. That opened to $US166 million. Here’s where we step through the looking glass. Movie ticket prices back then were $US8.50. More maths, and we get … 20 million tickets sold on the opening weekend. In other words, the Superman franchise has lost about half its fan base. Holy Kryptonite, Batman!

Hollywood’s biggest secret: despite all the incessant talk about box-office records, ticket sales have been heading south – for decades. Per capita movie-ticket sales were down by a third in the first 20 years of this century. (Australia’s admissions have declined similarly, from 92.5 million in 2001 to 55.4 million last year.) The pandemic made things much worse, of course, but the rebound hasn’t brought us back.

Fewer ticket sales mean someone has to pay, and it’s coming out of the pockets of those among us who still go to see movies on the big screen. It feels a lot like being mugged.

My wife and I went to the swanky Hoyts in Sydney’s Entertainment Quarter to see F1: The Movie the other night. Tickets for the “Xtreme Screen” showing were about $30 – and as I checked out online I saw that Hoyts had added a $5.10 “booking fee” to the order. (That extra 10 cents was a nice touch.)

That Xtreme Screen, incidentally, turned out to be what just a few years ago would pass as a “regular ol’ screen”. When the advertised time for F1 arrived, we got: a commercial. And another commercial, and another and another and another. Banks, airlines, cars, food, insurance companies. Then there were gambling and hard-liquor ads, too – at an all-ages PG movie. There were multiple ads for Hoyts itself and, adding insult to injury, an ad for the company that sold movie-theatre ads as well. About 30 ads in total.

Asking people to pay $30 to watch commercials for 20 minutes can’t be a good long-term business model. (Memo to NSW parliamentarians: Why not require movie theatres to honour posted start times and outlaw those slapped-on fees?)

Superman shows us that even superhero movies are losing audiences. They aren’t making that much money, either. The studios get back a bit more than half of the worldwide gross of a film. Industry scuttlebutt has it that Superman’s combined budget and marketing costs are upwards of $US425 million more. Translation: Warners Bros needs about $US900 million worldwide gross to make the film a success. Superman made $US220 million worldwide on its release last weekend. A typical superhero movie ends up grossing two or three times its opening weekend. The film will need to do a lot better than that to get into the black.

The latest impossible mission for Tom Cruise is making money on Mission: Impossible sequels. The last two have been huge flops. The latest Captain America? Barely broke even. The Marvels? Flop. The once-mighty Transformers? Flop.

The most recent Aquaman and Ant-Man films both lost money. That hullabalooed Indiana Jones film from a couple years back? A big, big flop. Some of these films are costing their studios hundreds of millions of dollars. F1, incidentally, which like Superman was hailed as a big hit on its release, stands to lose similar amounts. Its cost is said to be almost $US400 million but it’s only made about that much at the box office. Perhaps Apple, which financed it, is happy enough for it to be a “loss leader”.

But franchises, reboots and sequels don’t add up to big profits the way they used to. One tiny cultural shift in Gen Z or Gen Alpha movie-going could become an iceberg for the film industry. And we all know how that movie ended.

Bill Wyman is a former assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He lectures in journalism at the University of Sydney.