And do you think audiences care about that detail? I think you're giving them too much credit for thinking that a director's name/ratings would turn the themselves (general audience) off from watching a movie. In spite of mixed ratings, Man of Steel still made 660+mil with added DVD/home video sales, which would suggest that audiences don't really care about ratings/director's name. Same goes for movies like Transformers, where it's been panned since its inception, but it still makes money.
My point wasn't that audiences care about the names, my point was their reception to his products. Snyder's style doesn't reap broad success the way those other directors do, and it's NOT the audiences going,
"oh, it's that Snyder, better stay at home." It's them going,
"I don't know if this looks like something I'll enjoy." OR after they've seen it,
"eh, that could have been better. Probably won't see it again." His style doesn't have the broad appeal (or, one could argue, his movies don't deliver on their trailers' promise) to bring the kind of numbers that are generally expected of these characters. And yeah, MoS brought in $660m+, which was almost universally seen as a disappointing number at the time, since it didn't even beat that Spidey reboot which was ALSO seen as a slight financial disappointment. And now it's being eclipsed by Cap and
possibly even freakin'
X-Men (a series that's never been a major WW player). Sad day when those characters are competition for Superman. The bottom line is, if MoS had gotten a better response, it would have had better numbers. And for the record, I'm one who enjoyed MoS, so I'm not trying to bash it. But Cap had both the better film and the broader appeal, imo, so he deserved to beat MoS. And the ones to blame for that are Zack Snyder and David Goyer, for not making a Superman movie that more people could love. Snyder just doesn't make loveable movies, imo, and the evidence is in his track record: at the box office, with the audience's CinemaScore ratings, and with the critical reception.
Good thing for BvS is that it doesn't need to be loveable to make big numbers...but it would certainly help.