Name (or brand) recognition paired with the right rating can sometimes be more important than buzz. Just take a look at "GI joe: The Rise of Cobra". Although it didn't have a prescreening and relied on what turbed out to be bad reviews on the Internet, the film had a big opening week and almost made $300 million at the box office. This was enough to get the studios to commit to a sequel that may start filming at the end of this year. That is how important name recognition is. I would not expect a character like Nova, for example, to do half as well as Green Lantern due to that phenomena.