Suicide Squad grossed almost $750 million in 2016, even as critics treated it as one of the DCEU's sharpest misses. That split is why the film still comes up 10 years later: it made money, but it also helped define the franchise’s reputation problem.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice arrived in 2016 after Man of Steel introduced Henry Cavill's take on Superman in 2013, and it pulled in nearly $875 million worldwide. The film also holds a 28% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a gap that made its commercial total harder to read as a clean win for DC.
That combination mattered across the DCEU because the studio had to live with a franchise where audience spending did not match critical approval. Wonder Woman was a considerable step up after those releases, which gave DC a cleaner marker of what a stronger response could look like.
Margot Robbie and Will Smith
Suicide Squad was led by Margot Robbie and Will Smith, and those names still drive much of the film’s afterlife. Fans continue to bring up Ben Affleck as Batman, Robbie as Harley Quinn, and Viola Davis as Amanda Waller, a sign that the cast kept more goodwill than the film around them.
Later in the DCEU, Aquaman crossed $1 billion at the box office, but the conversation about the 2016 releases never fully disappeared. The reason is simple: the franchise's biggest early money-makers also became the titles most associated with the period when DC lost momentum.
Why the 2016 reset lingered
After Wonder Woman, Justice League was widely panned, which kept the earlier fallout from fading into history. The DCEU never really escaped the shadow of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad, because each new release was measured against the same question: could DC recover from those two films or had they already set the pattern?
For readers, the practical takeaway is that the debate is no longer about opening-weekend hype. It is about how two 2016 films still frame the way DC is discussed, and why Robbie's Harley Quinn remains one of the few choices from that era that many viewers still defend without hesitation.
