‘Justice League’ on HBO: Was DC’s Big Team-Up Movie Worth the Wait?

Tonight’s a big HBO night for superhero fans and the morbidly curious alike, as Warner Bros.’ almost-blockbuster Justice League lands on the network and its accompanying streaming service tonight! Wait, “morbidly curious”? “Almost-blockbuster”? What in the world am I insinuating in that opening sentence?! As with almost all of the movies in the shared DC Comics shared superhero movie-verse, everything about Justice League is fraught. Does that need to affect whether or not you’ll spend 110 minutes sometime this weekend watching wet and beardy Jason Momoa and dry and broody Ben Affleck slug it out with a CG monstrosity? Probably not! A movie’s box-office haul really has no effect on whether or not you’ll enjoy a flick on the Home Box Office. But from a sheer historical perspective, you gotta admit there’s a lot of interest in everything about Justice League that happened offscreen.

In terms of fan anticipation, Justice League really had few peers (Marvel’s The Avengers, and Episodes I and VII of Star Wars come to mind). The team, comprised of DC Comics’ A-list superheroes, first appeared in 1960 in The Brave and the Bold #28. This team predates The Avengers by three years, and no doubt directly inspired the formation of Marvel’s comparable team of big name heroes. Under the name Super Friends, the team reached TV screens in the ’70s and ’80s via a ridiculous and beloved cartoon series. A serious cartoon, Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, followed in the early-to-mid ’00s, introducing a new generation to the team and, TBH, creating the most accurate page-to-screen adaptation to date.

Obviously a feature film was what fans really wanted, and when Marvel scored a major hit with 2012’s The Avengers, it seemed like DC could and should try to pull off the same shared-universe trick. In fact, the writer’s strike of 2008 actually derailed a planned Justice League movie from Mad Max helmer George Miller (Armie Hammer was gonna play Batman, seriously). But that movie didn’t happen in 2008, and instead Marvel got a five-year head start, pioneering the cinematic universe format. A year after the release of Man of Steel in 2013, WB/DC announced their intention to build a movie franchise in the world built by director Zack Snyder. That’s where the story of this Justice League begins.

Warner Bros.’ worked hard to get to their big team-up movie way faster than Marvel. Whereas the competition released a solo film for each of their big heroes prior to The Avengers, WB decided to go about it from a reverse angle. 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice would introduce Ben Affleck’s Batman and (in a smaller role) Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman. It also featured brief cameos from the Flash (Ezra Miller), Cyborg (Ray Fisher), and Aquaman (Jason Momoa) as part of an email forward. Next up was 2016’s Suicide Squad, a movie that gave us a little bit more of Bat-ffleck but mostly focused on characters totally unrelated to Justice League. 2017’s Wonder Woman was the final film released before the big team-up movie, Justice League, which dropped in November 2017.

Production on Justice League was not easy. Just from a storytelling standpoint, director Zack Snyder and screenwriter Chris Terrio (also the BvS team) had to come up with a film that would really introduce audiences to Aquaman, The Flash, and Cyborg ahead of their solo films (the first of them, Aquaman, hits theaters this December). The initial plan to split up Justice League into two parts was scrapped, with each film instead telling their own story. Update on that: the second Justice League film has been pulled from the schedule and there appear to be no immediate plans for one. Then in May 2017, with the film in post-production, Snyder stepped down from the film due to a personal tragedy. That’s when DC called in a writer/director who knew a thing or two about making big superhero team-up movies: Joss Whedon, the guy who did the first two Avengers films for DC’s rival.

And this is where the story of Henry Cavill’s mustache begins.

With Whedon on board to oversee editing and reshoots, Warner Bros. sunk another $25 million into an additional two months of filming–a schedule that overlapped with Cavill’s Mission: Impossible–Fallout commitment. And, making matters hairier, Cavill had grown a mustache for that part that was deemed absolutely crucial to the character. WB had to just go with it, committing visual effects dollars to–I kid you not–digitally erasing Cavill’s mustache for many of his scenes as Superman.

Was all of this work worth it? Ultimately, no–if you’re just looking at box office numbers. The film is the lowest-grossing movie in the DC franchise, having earned $229 million domestically and $657.9 million worldwide. That seems like a lot of money, right? But apparently Warner Bros. needed the film to gross around $750 million in order to break even (the film definitely carried a hefty PR budget). It didn’t do that, and it didn’t even outperform Suicide Squad, a film starring characters nowhere near as iconic as Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. 2017 was a really up-and-down year for Warner Bros., going from their biggest superhero hit Wonder Woman ($821.8 million worldwide!) to the lackluster Justice League. DC’s trinity could not stand up to the one-two-three punch of Coco, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. And critics were also divided on the film, collectively giving it a 40% on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s noticeably higher than Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad (both at 27%), but still lower than the also-rotten Man of Steel (55%) and the actually acclaimed Wonder Woman (92%).

Bad reviews didn’t keep audiences away from the previous DC movies, so Justice League’s under-performance is a real head-scratcher. Maybe theaters were too crowded with big movies (Thor: Ragnarok opened up just before Justice League), or maybe people were put off by WB’s attempt to just make a blockbuster happen. Whatever the case, Justice League now lives on in the VOD and streaming world–and if you have HBO, you can finally judge this movie for yourself.

Where to stream Justice League