Who said I was giving excuses? I was giving facts, Superman Returns budget was 205 mils to MoS's 225, MoS had better affects because its 2013, its way ahead of 2006 in terms of technology, the others 60-70 mils were from the other movies that were scrapped. Comparing to Spider-Man is not okay, there was something new about the first Spider-Man movie, that's why it did good at the box office, same reason Superman I did better than its sequels, not even MoS did that well, you can compare Spider-Man movies to the first two Superman movies but after that Superman's box office went way down, you can search for the movies that had more than 10 years of gap between them, most of those movies make less than the preceders.
And I was just talking about the earnings, I did say it didn't make enough to earn a sequel, all I said was 400 mils is not a bad gross especially in 2006, when Superhero movies and 3D were hardly as popular as they were now, and I didn't post the overseas gross because 1) They aren't available 2) The overseas inflation is more than the domestic which only proves that it sold more tickets in overseas compared to domestic 3) Overseas market has become a bigger market in this decade, China, Japan, Russia, Korea are now the biggest bet for a movie's success, in 2006 that wasn't the case. And the guys who you're saying should be fired made more than just one billion dollar movies, and the MoS movie too, they're far more capable than you in this area.
Since we're now getting technical, Returns spent $100 million on marketing/promotion - so even discounting the addition of the failed starts it still lost $30 million. WB would have expected it to make over $500 million at least, otherwise they would not have invested as much as they did in this film. Also it was backed/enhanced/boosted (however you want to think about it) with an IMAX 3D release. There's way more that can be said just here about how they failed, but I'll leave it there for now on this specific point.
Sequels, especially in CBM's tend to perform better over-all, or it's at least balanced, assuming the other film is actually any good, within the current CBM era. Batman Begins kicked off the year before Returns, and would have been part of WB's thinking. Add in the success Singer had with X-Men - WB thought this was a sure thing.
None of the CBM's have a 10 year gap - in fact very few films at all have gaps that big in their franchises. In Superman's case it was actually 19 years. The closest thing to that I can think of is Star Wars - and it made A LOT of money. As a franchise it was always bigger, however NEW fans, such as kids are one of the biggest factors. This played into Spider-Man's success too. Superman Returns failed to capitalize on this.
International markets were already playing a factor in 2006 and earlier. If your film did no good overseas - it wasn't usually a good sign. Returns performed miserably overseas. Returns got almost half it's gross internationally - just under. But so did X-Men: Last Stand (over half a billion dollars that year worldwide gross) and Cars (just under half a billion dollars worldwide gross). All the other big earners (PotC: Dead mans Chest, Da Vinci Code, and a BUNCH of animated films) all had really strong international markets getting majority of their gross internationally, sometimes by a really big margin (Da Vinci Code and Casino Royal for example had over 70% of theirs come in from over-seas, with a combined input of almost $1 billion). So that goes against your theory "it wasn't the case" in 2006 (which is less than a decade ago, but I assume you mean since 2010?). PotC for the record grossed over a billion dollars. Domestic is not and has not bee the primary indicator or earner for quite some time now for successful films. Studios even bank on their international markets because the industry in the states has been in decline for some time, and their preference for things like 3D is lower than international markets too. Basically Superman Returns under-performed.
On the surface, sure it looks like it did OK domestically (6th highest for the year in fact), but over-all it failed in it's objective when you take into consideration it's budget and costing, how many theaters it opened in (it was one of a handful of movies to open in over 4000 theaters) and the dependency on international markets, and not having too much competition to open against. And it didn't. The only big, competing film to open around that time was PotC the following week. After it opened that was the only other really big film, and Cars had been open for 2 weeks before Returns came out. MoS ran into stiffer competition, in some places opening against Monsters University and Despicable Me 2 simultaneously. And then had to deal with World War Z the following week as well... all demographics that impacted on it (parents are taking their kids to the kids movies, young adults are watching zombies).
X-Men: Last Stand also goes to show a "sequels" performance can still be fine, and that wasn't a very good film either. Besides the 19 year gap should have worked in its favour by generating interest and enticing an entire new couple of generations of movie-goers. Also CBM's were very popular at the time - thanks to X-Men, Batman and Spider-Man, and unlike Batman, Superman Returns didn't alienate a key demographic of CBM's - children. Everything when viewed in context points to the film having a terrible performance, and it's simply because the film wasn't interesting enough to people. It under performed in contrast to other CBM's and it under-performed in contrast to it's own franchise. It's job is to make a profit and instead it lost money, a considerable amount.
See above - definitely lost money....
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