The "Birds of Prey" belly-flop highlights that retroactive hatred of Zack Snyder's films was one of the most irrational fits of the social media bubble-verse. Regular moviegoing folks LOVED those movies and bought oceans of tickets to see them.
Inside the social media bubble, fanboys (who were usually pretty jazzed about the Snyder films at first) ended up carping that he got Superman "wrong." But most of the audience saw him doing something INTERESTING with a venerable and kinda stale character.
When Tim Burton's "Batman" came out, I remember older people, my friends' parents, watching the ads and saying "That's not Batman! What kind of goofy nightmare IS this?" And then they went to see it, because they wanted to find out. Snyder intrigued his audience the same way.
Snyder's films have a sense of style that really sets them apart from Marvel or other superhero films. He grasped that the mythic stature of DC's characters is what sets them apart, mortal men trembling as giants walk the earth. It was different and, again, INTERESTING.
Marvel's cinematic achievement was astounding and its movies loads of fun, but nothing in them sticks with you quite the way the opening sequence of Batman vs. Superman does, showing you the Man of Steel finale from the ordinary man's point of view.
DC's done some good stuff post-Snyder, goofy fun like Shazam and Aquaman, but they mostly feel like Marvel movies. Snyder's vision is gone, and while comic nerds might quibble, it was strong enough to propel even broken ancillary junk like "Suicide Squad" to big box office.
Why did Bird of Prey flop while Suicide Squad soared? Sure, it hurts that BoP looked like the kind of woke lecture film audiences hate, and no Will Smith, but the obvious missing ingredient is no Zack Snyder. Suicide Squad explicitly tied into a film series people liked. /end
