The DCEU has always struggled with Rotten Tomatoes, but it turns out the franchise's box office averages are far better for the films with lower Rotten Tomatoes cores. The low Rotten Tomatoes scores of the earlier entries are often blamed for Warner Bros.' decision to drastically alter course, abandoning Zack Snyder's larger universe plan, but this change in direction hasn't yielded the results they thought it would.
Snyder's departure, although at the time WB defended the drop as a product of a high Thursday night preview box office of $27.7 million, which was the seventh-highest of all time (12th now).
Batman v Superman ultimately fell short of the billion-dollar benchmark sought after by most comic book blockbusters, although it's still the fifth highest-grossing DC movie of all time, after DCEU took a major pivot to be more crowd-pleasing with Aquaman, which paid off with both a mildly fresh 65% Rotten Tomatoes score and an all-time-high DC movie box office haul of $1.14 billion.
WB succeeded in bringing up average DCEU Rotten Tomatoes scores, but only to see declining box office with each movie. After Aquaman, the average DCEU score was 51% and the average global box office was $819 million. DCEU Rotten Tomatoes average to 63% and the box office even lower, although it's not totally fair since both those movies were impacted by the pandemic, but it's clear the trend had already started, and The Suicide Squad's 71.5% second-weekend drop even higher than Batman v Superman's (despite a low opening). If we look at the Snyder era (excluding Zack Snyder's Justice League since it had no theatrical release) and the post-Snyder era (excluding Justice League from both, to be fair) every movie before Justice League averaged 51% on Rotten Tomatoes and $776 million at the global box office, while the post-Snyder average is 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, but only $508 million, despite Aquaman's high performance.
Of course, the other odd-man-out in the conversation is Joker, which was another billion-dollar movie with a 68% Rotten Tomatoes score, but Warner Bros. tried to stop Joker from being made, besides the fact it's outside the DCEU continuity, with sensibilities are more in line with the Snyder era. Regardless, while there's certainly a lot to look forward to in the future of DC Films, it's clear the decision-making following Justice League may have been successful in improving Rotten Tomatoes scores, but the higher scores have only been accompanied by ever lower box office, suggesting maybe the review scoring metric isn't quite as important as WB execs thought it was.
