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Trump Blamed for ‘Superman’ Global Slump: Reeve’s 1978 Classic Debunks the Haters
Quote:If you’re in business and you’re not doing as well as you’d like in foreign markets in 2025, it doesn’t hurt to blame President Donald Trump. After all, you can claim some vague anti-American sentiment or tariff uncertainty or geopolitical blowback or whatever. It’s probably not true, but it doesn’t hurt to have a fall guy that the media doesn’t like.
This is especially true if you’re in the entertainment industry. Conservatives getting blamed for tanking films is hardly a new phenomenon, particularly this year. Critics complained that anti-woke backlash killed the box-office for Pixar’s “Elio,” say. Trump’s the head of that hydra, right?
Never mind the fact that when you took out the character’s “queer-coded” original persona, as Disney executives reportedly did, there wasn’t an actual story left to tell — which meant there wasn’t an actual story to begin with, except for a kid being “queer-coded.” If anything, Trump saved it from doing worse than it did.
It gets a little bit more complicated when you look at “Superman” — the new James Gunn-directed film which has done well enough at the box office, with one slight caveat.
As Hollywood-centric publication The Wrap noted, Superman was “off to a stellar start, with one lingering concern.” As for the stellar start, it took in $217 million worldwide with $122 domestic in its first weekend, along with an 82 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating and a good A- CinemaScore — i.e., the audience score, which demonstrates the kind of legs it has — as well.
But all was not well:
Now for the bad news: “Superman” did not reach $100 million in overseas grosses, slipping to $95 million internationally as approximately 56% of the film’s global grosses came from the U.S. and Canada.
A poor start in Asia was expected for “Superman,” grossing $13.3 million combined from China, Japan and South Korea. But aside from the $9.8 million opening in the U.K., numbers were low in Europe. Combined, the film made just $9.6 million from France, Italy and Spain, compared to $15.6 million for the opening weekend of “The Batman.”
Director James Gunn knew who was to blame: Trump!
“Superman is not a known commodity in some places. He is not a big known superhero in some places like Batman is. That affects things,” Gunn said, according to Variety.
“And it also affects things that we have a certain amount of anti-American sentiment around the world right now. It isn’t really helping us. So I think it’s just a matter of letting something grow. But again, for us, everything’s been a total win. Having the movie come out and be something that has been embraced by people everywhere — this is just the seed of the tree that Peter and I have been watering for the past three years. So to be able to have it start off so positively has been incredibly overwhelming.” [Emphasis ours]
That sounds great coming out of his mouth. Here’s the problem: There’s another superhero movie that came out this year which had a far better domestic-to-worldwide box-office ratio. An American superhero movie. Starring a superhero literally called Captain America in a film titled “Captain America: Brave New World.”
The domestic gross, as per Box Office Mojo: $200,500,001. International: $214,601,576.
“Superman,” meanwhile: $264,641,578 domestic, $173,100,000 international.
But, hey — maybe people associate Superman more with America than Captain America. After all, who could guess Captain America is American, especially just going by his name? So let’s look at the original “Superman,” released in 1978.
In case you remember how America was perceived in 1978, the answer: not well. We’d just gotten out of Vietnam a few years prior in circumstances that were, uh, less than ideal, the foreign policies of both the Nixon/Ford and Carter administrations were not viewed with unmixed delight in either Europe, Asia, or the rest of the world, and our prestige was at the point where a group of militant students stormed the American embassy in Tehran a year later and would precipitate a 444-day hostage crisis which would effectively end Carter’s presidency and U.S.-Iranian relations.
“Superman” 1978 box-office total: $134,478,449 domestically, $166,000,000 internationally. Those are non-adjusted dollars, but they’re pretty much the mirror-image percentage of what “Superman” 2025 is taking in.
So, what gives? Probably not anti-American sentiment. In fact, another very American property — the latest “Jurassic Park” film, “Jurassic World: Rebirth” — is dominating the international box office at present, despite being released a week earlier than “Superman.” Its tally has been $288,516,440 domestically, $373,504,423 internationally — so, again, there goeth that theory.
To a certain extent, Gunn might have hit the nail on the head with his explanation that Superman doesn’t carry the same cachet that other superheroes do, particularly Marvel ones, in foreign markets. This is especially true after a long run of troubled adaptations of DC Comics properties.
Aside from the stand-alone successes of the Christopher Nolan “Dark Knight” trilogy — which had a great deal to do with the fact that Batman is more popular worldwide and Nolan is considered one of the greatest filmmakers working today — the rest of the universe’s stable has done poorly, both financially and critically, at the box office.
If you want to go down the ultimate rabbit hole of how bad things can happen to good intellectual properties, do a search on “Snyder cut” and just start clicking on hyperlinked articles in what you find. Suffice it to say, the brand’s properties have been handled badly, and given that consumers are finally coming back to comic book movies after oversaturation and critical underperformance practically killed the genre, they’re more likely to come back to Marvel first, considering those movies have routinely been better handled.
Also, “Jurassic Park” films do well internationally because it’s easier to understand why dinosaurs kill people than what drives someone to fight evil dressed up in a costume, and “Jurassic World: Rebirth” is the first film in the series in a long while not to receive a total critical drubbing. (Granted, its 51 percent Rotten Tomatoes score ain’t great, but considering prior recent versions got scores made Joe Biden’s poll numbers look fantastic, there’s that too.)
Finally, it could just be marketing — or the fact that the film is harder to market, period. Superman is played by David Corenswet, whose star power has mostly been limited to critically acclaimed but commercially modest Netflix series. Lois Lane is Rachel Brosnahan, whose breakout role — the titular character in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” which was indeed marvelous — was in a series that definitely doesn’t translate well outside of an American milieu. (Forget explaining Lenny Bruce to foreign audiences; you try dubbing or subtitling the dialogue in an Amy Sherman-Palladino series into Chinese without losing the context.)
So blame all of those. But don’t blame anti-American sentiment when Captain freaking America — did I mention part of his name is America and he’s also the captain of it by implication? — did quite superbly at the foreign box office. It doesn’t hurt to blame Trump, no, unless somebody bothers to check your dumb, reflexive theory. Just saying.
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[NEWS] Trump Blamed for ‘Superman’ Global Slump: Reeve’s 1978 Classic Debunks the Haters
