If you take out the difference in money from China between Aquaman and The Batman, Aquaman still outgrosses it with about $880m. And Joker far outgrossed The Batman without any China money at all.
It's a fair question to ask, how can a Batman movie be made to gross at the top of the heap where it would be in line with the character's overall popularity worldwide?
Aquaman would say, make it a giant action spectacle, where he fights an army of CGI villains like Clayface, Poison Ivy and Man-Bat.
Joker would say, make it a deep character study of Bruce Wayne's psychology where he struggles through life after his parents' death and doesn't fight any villains at all except maybe at the end.
The MCU plan would say, keep using him in crossover movies so, like Iron Man, his movies keep going up in gross until they're over a billion.
They took a very safe approach with Reeves' Batman movie in every way. Definitely safer than Snyder making him a villain who loses his moral code. And basically copying some very clear templates laid out by Nolan and Burton, in terms of the visuals, characters, style and story. As well as taking cues from other popular movies like Se7en, Zodiac and Chinatown, rather than pulling more far-out concepts that have only appeared in comic book form. From the gross of The Batman, we can conclude that the safe, low-risk approach worked just like a safe, low-risk financial investment works. It didn't crash and burn and lose all their money, but it didn't offer any remarkable returns either.
And, now, we have Zaslav exploring an overhaul of DC Entertainment. It sounds like this is much more about corporate restructuring than about planning out the film content though.
And it's not just about films, but about synergy with TV, merchandise and gaming. The article is quite vague and erroneously states that "Under Walter Hamada, who took over DC Films from Jon Berg and Geoff Johns in 2018, the unit has achieved more consistency in terms of both the critical and commercial reception to the company’s movies." I don't know what's consistent between the box office of Joker and Birds of Prey.
One explicit thing is that Zaslav believes they're letting Superman languish, which he's definitely right about. He praises Joker as a model for how to handle 'second tier' DC characters, which seems like a deeply confused statement though. Joker is top tier, and we all know that's an extremely difficult type of film to replicate in success.
https://variety.com/2022/film/news/dc-warner-bros-discovery-zaslav-hbo-max-1235232185/