Box Office doesn't mean crap. It did as much as Batman Begins.
Opinions in here means... that some comics fans didn't like it. Respectable opinions; their expectations weren't fulfilled, but movies, as any other artistic expresion, often are not made for everybody.
But such a modest box office on an Independence Day Weekend must mean people either didn't know much about it, didn't like what they did know about it, or had heard bad things about it that put them off.
Batman Begins opened lower (not on a holiday weekend though) but never fell heavily, it had good legs, it had good word of mouth, it steamed on pretty solidly. People were enticed to go and see it. I remember an older woman at my workplace going to see it, and coming in raving on about how good and 'gripping' it was.
You say it like it's a bad thing.
Surely directors and studio bosses hope for a blockbuster!? Everyone hopes for amazing success on their work (especially if they were funding it!). You speak as though you are glad it wasn't a blockbuster.
What you are essentially saying is that you are happy with the movie as it was, you liked it, you don't care it wasn't a blockbuster, you didn't even want it to be one. Well, great for you. But that's rather a selfish position. Other people aren't happy with it. They wanted something more exciting, a Superman for this age, not harking back to the days of Donner.
I don't know, was it? Another extra 15 minutes of a trip to a bunch of static meteorites is a good idea beyond reasonable doubt? I rather have a good focus on why Superman FELT he had to go there.
Maybe it didn't need to be 15 minutes. Maybe it could have been happening partly or totally during the opening titles. But I'm sure it would have been better in there, in some form, than on the cutting room floor. The sequence was conceived, storyboarded, filmed/created/CGI'ed... only to be hacked out at the last minute. Therefore it must have seemed like a good idea for most of the moviemaking process. Otherwise it wouldn't have gone beyond an idea on a piece of paper to an $11m (or however-much) creation.
As for the focus on why he felt he needed to go there, we didn't get much focus on the whole thing. He vanished - no-one knew why, not even a former girlfriend (Lois) who worked in the press and would have known about Krypton being discovered. What WAS he expecting to find 30 years after the planet exploded? Did he think he'd never come home from a floating mass of rock? If it was all irradiated and turned into radioactive kryptonite, no one would have survived and he would himself have been at great risk from going near it. You can understand why he might need to find out if he was truly the last of his kind...and yet it was all dealt with so briefly.
With this movie, some people understandably feel there are pieces missing in context, detail, motivation and explanation. The circumstances around his leaving Earth in secret are, to some people, a bit shaky. They've been discussed on here in depth, so I'm not going into it all again except to say I believe he should have told Lois, or that she would have known anyway from media reports (indeed everyone would have guessed that's where he had gone).