Superhero movies are the biggest thing in the world of entertainment right now, but, it seems there's never any ceiling on growth. As movie stars, big characters, and popular franchises hit the big screen, expectations will continue to rise. When things fall short of studio profit projections, a box office success can become a failure. Black Adam is a perfect example.

Though you may still be able to find a screening nearby, Black Adam's theatrical run is basically over. It brought in just under $400 million on a reported $200 million budget. The typical fan might consider that a tidy profit, but Warner Bros. disagrees. Turns out, the film needed to bring in at least $600 million to break even.

RELATED: Black Adam: When Is A Superhero Movie Considered Unsuccessful?

About a month ago, Black Adam was portrayed as a mild success. Unimpressive, but more beneficial to its creators than negative. Today, as more bad news about the film comes out every day, it's more accurate to describe it as a failure. Not because everyone hated it, or because no one was interested in the pitch, or even because something else came along and slaughtered it in a fair fight. It's suffering the miserable death of massively inflated expectations. Warner Bros. was 100% certain that Dwayne Johnson's face on the poster guaranteed them a massive profit, so they blew at least double the production budget on marketing costs. The idea of this film bringing in less than half a billion dollars never even occurred to them. Warner Bros. has made a lot of dodgy decisions over the past few years, but, they're not alone in this failure.

Black Adam Box Office Flop

These days, superhero movies aren't the guaranteed success they were over the past decade. We're currently living through a very messy entertainment ecosystem. Companies are betting the farm on rash snap decisions and changing the entire 10-year plan every few weeks. When a company thinks it has a surefire hit on its hands, they happily put all its chips down and sit back, convinced that things will work out in its favor. Warner Bros. had one of the biggest movie stars in the world and a somewhat marketable DC Comics character, what could possibly go wrong? This kind of thing happens in the video game industry all the time. Does anyone remember when EA announced that Dead Space needed to sell 5,000,000 copies to keep the franchise alive? Just like WB, they set their expectations too high, and the audience paid the price for not paying them enough money.

If studios continue to bet everything on impossible levels of success, nothing will ever be good enough to warrant future investment. This obsession with massive financial returns, often against the forces of logic, will gradually render every element of franchise media unprofitable. Just a few decades ago, studios would make their money by raking in a tidy profit on multiple films. Today, the obsessive and greedy need to grow every year has killed that simple and successful business model. Making movies costs money, so they want to make fewer films every year. A reasonable profit isn't enough, so every release needs to be a billion-dollar event. On top of that, they reliably release a few bombs every year, so they need something to cover for their failures. With that in mind, the only way forward for myopic studios is to bet everything on billion-dollar hits. When they fall short, the entire empire risks falling to ruin.

In 2022, Warner Bros. produced and distributed The Batman, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Elvis, League of Super-Pets, Don't Worry Darling, and Black Adam. Batman made nearly four times its budget, Fantastic Beasts disappointed on the curve used to grade Harry Potter movies, Elvis, Super-Pets, and Darling were all fairly solid hits, and Black Adam was an aforementioned disappointment. Black Adam alone lost more money than Don't Worry Darling made in its entire run, but, other than that, the year should've been relatively profitable for the company. Conservatively estimated, factoring in the profit of their major films, WB made around $400 million from their theatrical releases over the past year. It is entirely possible that the studio brought in more money from 2017's Wonder Woman alone than they did from theatrically released films this year. Things are getting dire, and only a reasonably proportioned budget can save the day.

Dwayne Johnson Aldis Hodge Black Adam

The ongoing race to create a single cash cow will only lead to the slow death of the movie studio system. That may well be a good thing, but it will be a painful change for the industry and the audience. If Warner Bros. wants to continue to thrive, they need to make a lot of good films and trust audiences to show up in reasonable numbers. When they put everything on the back of a single film, they play with the future of the cinema industry. Black Adam isn't the first film to fail due to unfair expectations, and it won't be the last, but the risk of losing everything on a bad bet has never been higher.

MORE: Black Adam Wastes Its Best Asset