DC League of Super-Pets is off to a flying start at the box office with a $2.2 million performance on Thursday. Industry estimates for the DC Comics animated feature’s performance sit at around $20 million. With most kids and families heading out to see the movie on Friday and Saturday, you can expect that number to climb up there in short order. 4,300 theaters in North America are playing Super-Pets. DC is betting big on Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and a stacked cast. (This movie teams the WWE legend up with his friend Kevin Hart in starring roles.) Animated projects have fared well in the pandemic era. The Bad Guys and Minions both posted impressive performances at the box office. So, the race is on to see how far these Super-Pets can climb.
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Comicbook.com’s Liam Crowley spoke to director Jared Stern about how this movie got off the ground. Both Warner Bros. and the creative team loved the idea of bringing the Super-Pets back to audiences.
“I was working already at Warner Bros. and with DC, and I knew of the Super-Pets. I smushed those two ideas together. That’s the origin story of this perhaps origin story of our Super-Pets in our movie,” Stern said. “And so from there, I knew that I wanted a bunch of pets in a Metropolis animal shelter and it made sense for there to be a dog, obviously, like Ace, and perhaps there could be a squirrel like Chip and a turtle like Merton. And so it just fit with pets that you could find in a Metropolis shelter as I was digging. I wish we could have used all of the great pets in the DC canon, there’s a lot.”
He added, “We love the original Legion of Super-Pets like Comet and Beppo, but they’re Superman-centric. We wanted to get into potential pets for the whole Justice League. Our origin story delves into rescue pets who need a home so we leaned into DC animals who’d make sense at a Metropolis shelter, and just maybe match up with our Justice League.”
Here’s how DC Comics describes Super-Pets before heading in: “Krypto the Super-Dog and Superman are inseparable best friends, sharing the same superpowers and fighting crime side by side in Metropolis. However, when the Man of Steel and the rest of the Justice League are kidnapped, Krypto must convince a ragtag group of animals to master their own newfound powers for a rescue mission.”
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