The few defenders of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice pointed to the opening-weekend gross—a healthy, if unspectacular, $166 million, domestically—as a way of saying, basically, critics don't know nuthin' because, hey, the fans loved it. This, of course, misses the point of criticism, as a concept, but let's leave that aside.
Instead, let's focus on the film's second-weekend drop. Because it's a pretty big one, you guys!
Zack Snyder's Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice plunged 69 percent in its second weekend — one of the biggest drops in history for a marquee superhero title — even as it easily stayed No. 1.
Final numbers show the Warner Bros. title earning $51.8 million from 4,256 theaters for a domestic total of $260.9 million. That compares to Sunday's estimate of $52.4 million, which would have put the drop at 68 percent.
Sure, this movie was always going to have a relatively big weekend-to-weekend drop because this sort of flick is typically pretty front loaded. Still! That's a pretty sizable slide. And if we see something similar next weekend, I have a hard time seeing how this gets much past $325 million domestic. That's not a disaster or anything, and the international grosses have been good ($682M and counting), so it's not like Warners is in trouble of going under.
But it's pretty clear that Batman v Superman isn't exactly, you know, hitting it off with audiences. An almost-70 percent drop is the sort of slide that sends studios scrambling—to, say, make a dark movie funnier via tens of millions of dollars worth of reshoots.
I don't really think a lack of humor was this film's problem, though. (Granted, I also loved Man of Steel, and that wasn't exactly a yukfest either, so take my words with a grain of salt.) Rather, there were serious problems of coherence and world building, ones that left audiences scratching their heads when they weren't simply annoyed. Here's how I might have tried to fix the film's problems.
Steal a cosmic cube from Marvel; alter time and space so the Wonder Woman film currently shooting comes out first
Marvel spent five years building up to The Avengers, offering standalone features for Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and The Hulk—also introducing Black Widow and Hawkeye, remember—before bringing them all together. DC had Man of Steel, which was a fine start, and they probably could've gotten away with introducing Batman in a team-up rather than his own feature. But throwing Wonder Woman into the mix too? Sirs, you ask too much.
So yeah: My first fix would've been to have the Wonder Woman film set during World War One that they're filming now come out six months or so ahead of BvS:DoJ. That way you could get away with, you know, not even naming her in BvS. Audiences would have some familiarity! And you have a perfect bridge to BvS if you had a post-credits scene where, say, a squad of Lex Luthor's goons—headed by the guy we see in the desert and later with the flamethrower, perhaps—break into Diana's house to steal the photo she wants returned in BvS. That way Diana's presence at Lex's shindig makes more sense.
Speaking of Lex...
Make Lex Luthor more credible and tie him directly to Darkseid
I've detailed my issues with Lex elsewhere; suffice to say, I didn't quite buy his evolution from "guy who wants to protect humanity from aliens" into "raving psycho loony tune."
I get the sense from the closing scene in the prison where Batman brands the wall (combined with the parademons in Batman's post-apocalyptic dream sequence, more on that in a moment) that Lex was hinting at Darkseid's arrival following the death of Superman. So let's have Darkseid—basically the DC equivalent of Thanos, the big bad Marvel has been teasing for years now—actually manipulate Lex! Maybe Darkseid could, I dunno, send him visions of Superman destroying the planet. He has these dreams of destruction and death and winged demons and decides to embark on a metahuman hunt. (This could be why he sends the team to confirm Diana's identity!) Maybe Bruce could see a painting by Lex while he's traipsing around the basement, looking for the Lexcorp server, a painting featuring the demons from his own dreams. "Who painted this?" he could ask the Asian woman-servant who Lex blows up later on for no particularly good reason. "Why, Mr. Luthor, of course. He says he paints what he dreams."
This solves another of our problems, btw...
Make Batman's weird dreams more resonant/pointed
Okay, so, the weirdest thing in Batman v Superman is a dream sequence during which Batman sees a post-apocalyptic future in which Superman has taken over and is killing everyone and is aided by winged demons. Batman wakes up from this dream and then sees The Flash coming back in time to warn him about Lois Lane or something—after which he wakes up again. Dreams within dreams, with some time travel and sight-beyond-sight thrown in for good measure.
This was altogether too tricksy. But there was a nugget of a good idea here. What if Batman and Lex were both being shown an alternate future by Darkseid or one of his minions in an effort to rile them against Superman? In order to clear the stage for an Apokolips-led invasion? Again, this would help with the world-building (Batman would also be interested in Lex's metahuman hunt, doubly so since one of them just appeared to him in a dream warning him about Lois Lane), and it would keep audiences from being quite as flummoxed as they were. You just have to make it a bit more explicit: we're not all DCU scholars, you know.
If you did all of these things—introduced Wonder Woman in her own movie; better explain Lex's descent into madness by blaming it on the influence of Darkseid; and shown that Batman had reason to believe in the "metahuman thesis"—then WB and director Zack Snyder maybe could've gotten away with the film's most egregiously awful moment: the in-film teaser trailers for Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg films. Frame them as pieces of a puzzle Lex and Bruce Wayne are trying to piece together, maybe.
I dunno. You'd still be asking a lot of the audience. But not quite as much.