DC Comics movies box office revenue in the U.S. & Canada 1978-2024

As of 2024, the highest-grossing DC Comics film adaptation in the United States and Canada was "The Dark Knight" (2008), which generated more than half a billion U.S. dollars at box offices across the two countries. "The Batman", released in March 2022, ranked fourth after grossing almost 370 million dollars at the so-called North American box office.

Superheroes on the big screen

After reaching, in 2020, its second-lowest point this century, the annual box office revenue of superhero movies in the U.S. and Canada experienced a tenfold increase in the following year. Still, the 2021 figure amounted to approximately only 45 percent of the 3.2-billion-dollar box office revenue recorded in 2019, before the pandemic. Apart from the impact of COVID-19 on cinemas' business model, American audiences have expressed an increasing superhero movie fatigue. The share of internet users in the U.S. saying they enjoyed the genre but were getting tired of so many superhero films went from 17 percent in 2018 to 23 percent at the end of 2021.

Is Gen Z too cool for superhero movies?

Members of Generation Z are less passionate about superhero films than Millennials. During a December 2021 survey, two-thirds of Generation Y respondents in the U.S. stated that they watched superhero movies at least once a month, while 56 percent of Gen Z interviewees said the same. But the genre remains a significant aspect of the American Gen Z lifestyle: half of the respondents from that age group said they monthly watched superhero shows, and 30 percent said they read superhero comics at least once a month.