"Early Evening estimates have Warner Bros.’ Suicide Squad at $140M for the weekend after a Friday that’s between $63.5M-$65M. But, when it comes to the audience and critics’ response to the film, it’s deja-vu all over again. Like Batman v. Superman, which earned a 27% Rotten Tomatoes score and B Cinemascore, Suicide Squad is getting panned by critics (26% Rotten Tomatoes) and has registered an above average response from CinemaScore crowds who gave it a B+ tonight. We’ll assess the long- term ramification of that in a bit, but Warner Bros. marketing department needs to be applauded here for delivering the third-best domestic opening of 2016 to date, the second best of the summer (after Captain America: Civil War‘s $179.1M) and the best opening of Will Smith’s career. Suicide Squad continues to validate Warner Bros. ability to capitalize on its brands.

At the beginning of the summer, rival distribution heads didn’t know whether to make heads or tails about Suicide Squad‘s prospects. After watching Warner Bros. get beat up by crowds and critics despite its $872.7M global business, distributors didn’t know if the DC villain film would work. Warner Bros. executives weren’t cocky either about Suicide Squad’s potential. However, they put their heads down, tubthumped the hell out of this movie, and saved it from being collateral damage in the wake of BvS.

The first thing that Warner Bros. did right in regards to jumpstarting the buzz on Suicide Squad was releasing the Comic-Con sizzle reel for the movie a year ago, rather than making it a precious commodity for Comic-Con attendees. Fanboys were stoked by it. That’s why they pirated it and spread it around the web. Warner Bros. listened and dropped their high quality version online promptly.

But when BvS was flogged for being too dark and serious, the news hit at the end of March that Suicide Squad was returning for reshoots (some say that cost the studio an extra $22M). Ayer insisted in interviews and on Twitter that Warner Bros. was just granting him creative license to add more elements.

David Ayer ✔ @DavidAyerMovies
#SuicideSquad “reshoots for humor” is silly. When a studio loves your movie and asks what else you want, go for it! #ThanksWB #moreaction
3:17 AM - 11 Apr 2016

Suicide Squad star Jai Courtney also mentioned that the film already had enough humor in it prior to the reshoots, and that it was just about lensing more action scenes. However, there are others who insist that the reshoots were definitely about supplying more humor, and that those moments wound up in subsequent trailers. Whatever side of the story is true, the point is by the time CinemaCon rolled around in April, there was a brand new, kick-ass “Ballroom Blitz” trailer that Warner Bros. dazzled exhibitors and was definitely responsible for changing the industry’s attitude toward the movie post BvS. Warner Bros. kept dropping trailers through Comic-Con; Margot Robbie’s sexy-sassy Harley Quinn gradually grabbed the spotlight and is now the pic’s ‘It’ girl, fashioned on T-shirts online and a Loot Crate promotion.

By mid June, ComScore’s PreAct noticed that Suicide Squad was already owning the social media conversation after dropping character posters and debuting the Twenty One Pilots music video “Heathens” off the new soundtrack with new footage. In the weeks to come, Suicide Squad would lord over other summer movies like Star Trek Beyond and Ghostbusters, as well as other highly anticipated titles like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Warner Bros’ own Fantastic Beasts. Suicide Squad was the most buzzed about title on social during Comic-Con week (July 18-24) with 231K conversations to Wonder Woman’s 151K and Justice League’s 110K. Suicide Squad continued to reign atop PreAct’s chart through July 21 with 172K conversations for the week and a running total of two million-plus.

With a social reach close to 600M across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube views, Suicide Squad’s social reach is considered exceptional by RelishMix. The film’s Facebook page in recent days added 80K likes per day, which is off the charts by the social media monitor’s measure. Smith is tubthumping to his 75M Facebook fans, Cara Delevingne pumped up the DC adaptation to her 43M, while Jared Leto has reached out to his 13M. Despite the bad reviews, certain flags on social indicated how big Suicide Squad was bound to be: Its 26 videos on the film’s playlist have chalked up 163M views. The“Heathens” music video has clocked close to 75M views on YouTube. Overall, the conversation online has been extremely positive per RelishMix, with fans who’ve already seen the film leading the positive word of mouth charge. Some are still talking about the footage that dropped at Comic-Con last summer, while others are chatting up the film’s string of bad guys.

In regards to the critical and audience reception for Suicide Squad, it’s still up in the air how much mileage this DC feature property has. In relation to its $166M opening, BvS had a two multiple when it finaled domestic with $330.36M (just $2.8M short of overtaking Guardians of the Galaxy stateside). One non-Warner Bros. distribution suit waves off the negative reviews for Suicide Squad, predicting “In its first week, it’s going to make $230M-$250M!” This is further bolstered by the fact that CinemaScore crowds under 35 gave Suicide Squad an A-, while 76% females gave it an A-. The pic also earned an A with the under 18 demo (28%). Others think that a 60% second weekend decline is imminent. By and large, BvS didn’t have such high marks. The other advantage that Suicide Squad has over BvS, is that there’s more kids out of school in the coming weekends. BvS’ business was largely frontloaded because of Easter weekend. Still, many reviews gripe that there’s a good movie in Suicide Squad, it just missed the mark. Keep in mind it’s not just major outlets like The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and The Los Angeles Times flinging popcorn at Suicide Squad, but hipster outlets like Collider and Slate too. The mind wonders, if reviews were through the roof, how much higher would the box office be? Would Suicide Squad’s legs be any longer?"