There aren’t a lot of movie fans who don’t have an opinion on Zack Snyder. Depending on who you talk to his time spent making movies at Warner Bros., and specifically spent working on DC Films projects, was either terrible or wonderful. Everybody has thoughts on Snyder it seems, but while differing opinions on quality are fine, one studio executive wants to set the record straight on the actual success of the films.
Zack Snyder made movies for WB starting in 2004 with 300 and continued working at the studio until 2021, when he finished Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and also acted as an executive producer on James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. Greg Silverman, former President of Warner Bros. Pictures during much of that time, recently responded to a tweet claiming that several of those projects lost money. He claimed that, while there were a couple of movies that were not profitable for WB, the vast majority of Snyder’s output was profitable.
Not true. We lost some money on GAHOOLE and a fair amount on SUCKERPUNCH. The rest of his films at WB were very profitable. Very. https://t.co/5WuQMuRriHJuly 31, 2023
If you limit what you count as a “Zack Snyder movie” to what he directed, there are eight projects between 300 and Zack Snyder’s Justice League. If you include the movies that he also produced, however, you’re talking about a lot more. It’s unclear what metric Silverson is using, but either way, there’s certainly an argument to be made that backs up what he’s saying.
The initial tweet that Silverson is responding to is interesting because it makes reference to three or four “losers” between 300 and his time working on DC. In point of fact, Snyder only worked on three movies in that period. Two of them are the ones that Silverson admits lost money. It sounds like he might have to agree Sucker Punch was a significant failure, though he implies that Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole was only a moderate loss.
The third movie in question was Snyder’s adaptation of Watchman, which did gross less than $200 million at the global box office and probably wasn’t successful theatrically, but the movie reportedly sold very well on DVD and according to sources did eventually become profitable. Even Watchman star Patrick Wilson has brought up the film recently, showing that it continues to be relevant. That’s likely what also happened with any of Snyder’s other projects that didn’t immediately turn a profit at the box office. We know the Blu-ray release of Zack Snyder's Justice League sold a lot of copies to the fans still holding out hope for a future for the Snyderverse.
Of course, when you include movies that Zack Snyder produced for Warner Bros. you're adding in movies like Aquaman and its $1 billion box office and the insanely popular Wonder Woman movie.
Hollywood accounting gets talked about a lot but the fact is that it’s difficult to know from the outside just how much a movie costs to make, and it's equally difficult to know how many potential avenues for profit there are for any given movie. While many of Snyder’s movies may not have made as much money at the box office as WB may have hoped, and some might have even lost money there, it sounds like the vast majority of his projects were ultimately money-makers.
