An Extensive Look At Marvel & DC At The Movies

Often when I peruse various comic book movie forums, I will come across people making boisterous claims about how DC has fewer movies but they are much higher quality than Marvel, or that Marvel is preferred by the general audience because they have much better Box Office returns. So I finally cracked and decided to get the numbers on these claims. I know that DC movies are really made by Warner Bros., but we can compare the intellectual properties, of which DC is relevant.

Now obviously, Marvel has made more movies than DC. So in order to accurately compare the two, we're going to average out the numbers for each company. The following lists are for movies that made Silver Screen Box Office numbers, and the statistics are sourced from IMDB.com, BoxOfficeMojo.com, RottenTomatoes.com, and Metacritic.com. Let's begin:

Average Domestic Gross:

Marvel: 185.51M$
DC: 132.35M$
Advantage: Marvel (By about 50M$ per movie)

(A statistic that will surprise no one: DC's top 9 highest grossing movies are all Batman or Superman adaptations, as well as 11 of their top 13)

Average Worldwide Gross:

Marvel: 416.15M$
DC: 328.90M$
Advantage: Marvel (By about 90M$)

"Whoa! Hold the PHONE! Quite a few of DC's movies came out in the 70's and 80's, when Marvel's big boom didn't occur until the 2000's! Of course Marvel will make more, inflation!" Excellent point. So let's see what the average budget put into each movie amounts to:

Average Budget:

Marvel: 128.66M$
DC: 107.27M$

This shows the disparity right there. Older movies were cheaper to make, so despite DC throwing 200M$ at every adaptation these days, they still come in a bit behind Marvel in this department. Superman: The Movie was a big budget blockbuster at 55M$ when it was released. These things have to be taken into account. So lets take average gross and divide it by budget to find out how much every studio makes per dollar spent:

Percentage of Gross Return on Each Dollar Spent, Domestic:

Marvel: 144%
DC: 123%
Advantage: Marvel (By 21%)

Percentage of Gross Return on Each Dollar Spent, Worldwide:

Marvel: 323%
DC: 307%
Advantage: Marvel (By 16%)

Marvel does make a bit more at the box office. I don't believe general audiences have full working knowledge on which movies come from which companies, especially when you get down to the Ghost Riders and the Green Lanterns. DC's lower % may be atttributed to their repeated failures trying to adapt non-Superman/Batman franchises, or it may be the opposite, and they don't have enough franchises for people to get attached.

So next, let's check out reception to these movies.

Average Metacritic Score:

Marvel: 54
DC: 55.14
Adantage: DC (By about 1 point)

Average Rotten Tomatoes Score:

Marvel: 57.7% (Rotten)
DC: 52.44% (Rotten)
Advantage: Marvel (By about 5%)

Average IMDB User Rating:

Marvel: 6.5
DC: 6.1
Advantage: Marvel (By about .4 rating)

So, in conclusion, Marvel is a slightly bigger name in the motion picture business in seemingly quantity and quality. One advantage DC does have is since they have fewer movies out, it will take fewer home runs to improve their scores here than it would take Marvel. It will be interesting to see where these companies will be at in 10 years. I hope you also found some interesting information in these statistics.