Staying home (alone) for ‘Suicide Squad’

AUGUST 8TH, 2016 — POST 217

So Suicide Squad did it. Polygon overnight reported that the latest entrant in the DC superhero expanded universe broke the August domestic box office record with $135.1mil, as well as stacking another $250mil internationally. Widely touted as DC’s answer to Marvel’s Avengers series — in which an ensemble of superheroes come together before being spun into their individual movies — Suicide Squad, with figures like these, already looks set to spawn future Harley Quinn, Joker, and possibly even Deadshot movies.

I was never going to see Suicide Squad. I remember when the trailer was leaked last year, shot on phone at Comic Con, and the whole internet seemingly went insane. I get it, these just aren’t for me. But when initial reviews of Suicide Squad started hitting the web, the tenor was decidedly different from most of the other superhero properties in recent years. Where somehow critics are able to reward Marvel’s movies mostly with praise (we’re all somehow convinced Guardians of the Galaxy was the best movie of the last 5 years), Suicide Squad has been almost unanimously torn apart.

Simply entering “suicide squad review” into Google will give you a pretty good taste of the critical consensus. Richard Lawson at Variety seems able to neatly summarise the sentiment:

“Suicide Squad is bad. Not fun bad. Not redeemable bad. Not the kind of bad that is the unfortunate result of artists honorably striving for something ambitious and falling short. Suicide Squad is just bad.”

The sheer weight of negative reviews has caused the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes score to fall to — at the time of writing — a paltry 26%. This score only had to drop to 34% to get Kwame Opam of The Verge to write a piece in an attempt to placate the anger fans were displaying toward critics. Opam’s thesis is evident in his first callout:

“Good criticism = better comic movies”

And yet “good criticism” seems to have done nothing to kneecap box office numbers. I thought, seeing these early reviews, that Suicide Squad would tank, that people would just stay home. But the opposite has happened. If Opam can hope that DC will get the memo and do better by him and DC fans, the only memo DC has got is “Keep going just like this”.

There is still some scepticism that Suicide Squad could break more records. Commenters on the Polygon piece have noted that numbers fell on Saturday, boding poorly for the movie’s longevity in the face of negative word of mouth. Another commenter rightfully pointed to the vanity of box office figures at all:

“The country has more people in it every year. Ticket prices go up every year. Without adjusting for inflation in these measures, box office records are a meaningless regurgitation of industry PR advertising. It’s like saying 2016 set the record for highest numerical year ever in history.”

All this being said, there is still some sense in which bad movies can’t fail. The recent Leave vote in the Brexit referendum led to a lot to claim that the general public just doesn’t care about expert opinions and what we’re seeing with Suicide Squad is something similar. The marketing budgets on these movies are just too big, create too much pull for most people to ignore, irrespective of how worthy consuming any one of these movies might be.

Writing on micro-targeted pornography for Aeon, Mark Hay observes something that could easily be made of a lot of cultural industries, comic book movies in particular:

“the content pushed upon us will likely increasingly reflect what is most profitable, not what is most widely desirable.”

This might seem to be an attempt to pull apart things that are inherently enmeshed. How can something be profitable whilst not widely desired? But when the cinematic diet, especially during summer, is so restricted, these kinds of movies are just going to keep making money.

The hope for better movies — a hope that shouldn’t be hard to hold — just doesn’t seem possible in the face of facts.