8 Reasons Suicide Squad Became A Box Office Success (Despite Being Terrible)

As David Ayer's dud beats out major Marvel hits, it turns out the real joke's on the haters.

By Alex Leadbeater /

Warner Bros. Pictures

Well, this is unexpected. When anybody online last paid attention to Suicide Squad it one of the biggest (if realistically not all that unexpected) disappointments of the year, a third strike for the flailing DCEU that beautifully showed the full extent of studio meddling. A couple of months on from release, however, and it now looks to be – and this pains me to say it – a box office success.

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Oh, it started off like you’d expect from a DCEU misfire; a massive opening weekend making way for a frankly staggering drop-off in the second week as word-of-mouth spread. But now the numbers tell a different story. Sitting on $720 million worldwide, it’s a bonafide hit, recently passing the likes of Captain America: The Winter Soldier and steadily closing in on Deadpool.

But why? How has a film all but die-hard DC fans have agreed is not up to much (and I’m being very, very kind there) managed to prove so lucrative in a summer defined by an endless stream of box office bombs? There’s no single answer, but I think I’ve got it down to eight...

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