One of last year’s most notorious DC flops has become the most-watched movie of the year on Max.
When movies come to cinemas, people are usually a bit pickier about what they go to see. There’s more factors to consider; the price of tickets, finding the right time of the day to go, buying snacks for you, your partner, and perhaps your kids – it all mounts up.
Word-of-mouth may help films overcome lower expectations when they’re in theaters – just look at Oppenheimer, one of Christopher Nolan’s most successful movies ever – but when it comes to streaming, viewers will watch anything if they missed it the first time around and/or it’s in their respective platform’s chart. For example, Suits is the biggest show of the summer, racking up billions of minutes viewed – and it ended in 2019. The Snowman, one of the worst movies of the past decade, was also a chart-topper on Netflix.
Now, Max has found its biggest hit from another unlikely source: a DC movie with a low Rotten Tomatoes score and disappointing box office haul.
Black Adam is the most-watched movie on Max in 2023
Black Adam is said to be Max’s most-watched movie of the year so far, according to The Hollywood Handle.
‘BLACK ADAM’ is the most watched movie of the year on MAX so far. pic.twitter.com/yHeA8cWN0P
— The Hollywood Handle (@HollywoodHandle) September 6, 2023
Max, HBO’s streamer, recently added top 10 charts to its platform for TV shows and movies. Currently, Black Adam is nowhere to be seen, with The Flash holding the number one spot, followed by the likes of Blade and Ocean’s Eleven.
Black Adam may have failed to connect with audiences in a big way during its theatrical release, grossing just $393 million, but it landed at number one on the VOD chart last November.
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Whether or not it should be considered a failure is a subject of debate: in December, Dwayne Johnson said his financiers had confirmed profit between $52-72 million, but Forbes estimates it would have needed to make “$560-600 million in box office [returns] just to break even.”
During a recent appearance on Hart to Heart, Johnson addressed the movie’s performance, explaining: “I think that Black Adam got caught in a vortex of new leadership, and at that time as we were creating Black Adam, developing it, shooting Black Adam, we got knocked down a little bit because of COVID and the shutdown got back up.
“There were so many changes in leadership. And as you know, any time you have a company, but especially that size and magnitude, that’s a publicly traded company, and you have all those changes in leadership, you have people coming who creatively, fiscally are gonna make decisions that you may not agree with philosophically. So I think that Black Adam was one of those movies that got caught in that web of new leadership.”
Black Adam is available to stream on Max now, which you can sign up for here. You can also check out our upcoming DC hubs below:
The Batman Part II | Joker 2 | Superman: Legacy | The Brave and the Bold | The Sandman Season 2
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