How Much Money Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Lost Compared To The Biggest Movie Flops

Summary Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League cost Warner Bros Discovery $200 million.

The game's financial loss is on par with some of the biggest movie flops of all time.

Issues with Suicide Squad: KTJL highlight the risks of banking on live-service revenue streams.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League hasn't been the most resounding success of the year, to put it lightly, and a new report of financial losses from the game puts into perspective just how much of a disappointment it was. Profitability concerns are rife in the video game industry at large, as seen by rounds of recent layoffs that have impacted even the developers behind games that were successful by any normal metric. Even while efforts that can be best described as AA are getting punished, it's the blockbuster AAA titles that are losing the larger investments.

Concerns surrounding Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League were established well ahead of its release, as the fanbase built up by developer Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham games never seemed particularly receptive to the new DC venture. Despite awkward assurances that Suicide Squad: KTJL wasn't a live-service title, it very much came across as one, raising concerns about monetization and how much bespoke content would really be there at launch. When it finally came out, things only got worse, with key issues taking the always-online title offline twice within its first few days of early access availability.

Related What Happened Between Batman: Arkham Knight And Suicide Squad: KTJL? A lot has changed in the Arkhamverse in the five years between Batman: Arkham Knight and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League Lost $200 Million

Rocksteady's Newest Game Cost Warner Bros Discovery A Lot

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As reported by Business Insider based on the first-quarter 2024 earnings of Warner Bros. Discovery, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League racked up a $200 million loss for the company. There's no way to sugarcoat that kind of news, as it's an absolutely enormous sum by any metric. This kind of loss could only come as a consequence of the increasingly Hollywood-like approach to the gaming industry, where major IPs receive lengthy development cycles and massive investments in hopes of profits at a similar scale.

How Suicide Squad: KTJL's Loss Compares To Movie Flops

Kill The Justice League Is Playing With The Big Boys

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Even in Hollywood itself, however, a failure of this magnitude isn't exactly common. Box office duds come and go with distressing frequency, but the vast majority of films don't cost $200 million to begin with, and anything that does usually has good reason to believe it can make money back. Without taking inflation into account, only three of the biggest box office bombs would fully qualify as equivalent catastrophes, although adjusting for it significantly expands the array.

Film Loss (Adjusted For Inflation) John Carter (2012) $255 Million The Lone Ranger (2013) $240 Million The Marvels (2023) $237 Million The 13th Warrior (1999) $227 Million Mortal Engines (2018) $204 Million Cutthroat Island (1995) $202 Million Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003) $199 Million Strange World (2023) $197 Million Pan (2015) $185 Million Tomorrowland (2015) $185 Million

The performance of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League ultimately fits right in with the biggest financial losses from blockbuster films, occupying a spot right around the middle of the top ten. As the failure of The Marvels earns it the only superhero movie spot on the list, Suicide Squad: KTJL easily nabs the spot of the second-biggest loss from a major release in that field. Considering how poorly some DC films performed in the past year or so, it's noteworthy that none from the brand even come all that close to the game's disaster.

Related Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Review - "Not Enough To Save The Day" A multiplayer game about killing the Justice League from the creators of the Batman Arkham trilogy fails to revolutionize an oversaturated genre.

Financial success and quality obviously aren't always directly tied, although tepid or outright negative reception rarely helps matters. It's not hard to make an argument that John Carter and The Lone Ranger, which hold the esteemed ranks of the biggest box office flop ever and the direct runner-up, are more interesting ventures than some other Disney properties that were profitable. In the realm of Suicide Squad media, the more recent James Gunn film garnered both significantly better reviews and significantly worse monetary returns than David Ayer's earlier take.

All the same, it's hard to deny that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League suffered from a lack of what made the Batman: Arkham series so beloved. Despite some fluid combat and effective banter, the live-service campaign hasn't proven as compelling as the atmospheric and dynamic stories that previous games boasted. Game companies just keep making big bets on titles that are supposed to deliver continual profits and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is an example of how horribly wrong this method can go.

Source: Business Insider