While the latest Superman has done incredibly well at home — to the tune of $253 million so far — the DC Universe movie hasn’t flown quite so high in the rest of the world. Writer-director James Gunn has some theories about why.
“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 told Rolling Stone this week, after he was asked why superhero films don’t seem to be connecting with international audiences the same way they are in the United States. “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.”
The superhero film starring David Corenswet as the “Man of Steel, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, and Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, won the box office in a landslide in its second weekend in theaters. In addition to its staggering domestic haul, the DC Universe pic has raked in $173 million internationally, for a total of over $426 million globally, as of Wednesday, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com.
President Donald Trump‘s administration has shaken up the world order by, for instance, withdrawing from treaties or alliances with other countries. Last month, Pew Research Center found that overall views on the country have dimmed in his second term, although it’s unclear how that plays into moviegoers’ choices.
But Gunn was hopeful.
“We’re definitely performing better domestically than we are internationally, but internationally is also rising and having really good weekday numbers in the same way we are,” he said. “So obviously the word of mouth is very positive both here and everywhere else, which is the thing that we needed to do the most. At the same time, there are certain countries in which it’s really performing well: Brazil and the U.K.”
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The director of other superhero films, including Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and DC’s The Suicide Squad, noted that Superman had already seen a lot of success.
He found it “incredibly overwhelming.”
Gunn, who took over DC Studios alongside Peter Safran in November 2022, is rebooting the DC universe with interconnected movies and TV shows scheduled years out. The duo’s master plan — dubbed “Gods and Monsters” — technically started with last year’s animated series Creature Commandos on Max. Though the show isn’t crucial to the bigger picture, Superman and season 2 of Max original series Peacemaker (premiering Aug. 21) are “both pretty important in terms of getting to the bigger story,” Gunn told EW for our June cover feature.
The next DCU film queued for release is Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, starring Milly Alcock as Kal-El’s cousin Kara Zor-El, on June 26, 2026, and a Wonder Woman movie is “being written right now,” Gunn said.
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