24
votes
‘Supergirl’ fall to earth with $68m worldwide opening
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Box Office: 'Toy Story 5' Near $600M, 'Supergirl' Bombs $68M Worldwide
- Authors
- Anthony D'Alessandro
- Published
- Jun 28 2026
- Word count
- 684 words
It was good. Not Superman level, but better than most Marvel stuff from the past few years. Jason Momoa as Lobo definitely added to it.
It had an odd sense of feeling like it was trying to be a James Gunn film, but not actually being one. It connects well with the prior film and helps expand the world they're building, serving as an important explanation of Kara's origins, since that's less well-tread territory than Clark's.
There seems to be a lot of harm done by the usual pattern I see: a lot of people already talking about a film being "bad" before it even releases, and that vague sentiment gets passed around. (Add a multiplier if the protagonist is a woman.) The buzz gets flattened before the film even effectively exists to the public, driven by people who have loud opinions but don't actually watch films.
I mentioned I was seeing it on opening day to multiple people IRL, and got various responses along the lines of "isn't it being panned?" Coupled with admitting they hadn't been to a theater in years. It's a movie, not a car. It's not an investment. It's a few dollars to try something. Why should I care about the opinion of someone who doesn't engage with the art form? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For context the much maligned Morbius in 2022 opened globally with 84 million and the domestic opening was 39 million. Supergirl doing 68M WW and 38M is horrific. It’s an absolute disaster and will probably lose WB 200M.
I thought this would be a Thunderbolts. Would make a decent amount of money but doesn’t quite break even, but at least gets received well that it helps build back the brand. This didn’t do that since it was received poorly critically and is sporting some of the worst audience scores of any superhero movie.
We did a reboot just to end with similar results to what Snyder was doing.
This is also the first DC project Gunn didn’t direct or write. Which means he might not know how to discern if a project is good.
I do think someone like Dan Lin, who was in talks to take over DC, would have probably been a better manager. Since he’s just a producer and is able to make tough decisions, especially as he’s now in charge of Netflix. We can see he would have done stuff like, shelf the 2023 slate, force the Pattinson Batman to merge with the universe, and had a focus on the big name characters. I also think he would have gotten Lord and Miller to do Superman but that’s besides everything.
Maybe Clayface will do better, and Man of Tomorrow will hit, but it’s just a tough environment to make superhero movies with smaller characters especially when they’re not good.
Super heroes dominated the box office for a solid decade. I'm just tired of them at this point and just kinda space out when trailers for them come up
There was a discussion happening in a music subreddit about how if you came up in 2016-2019, that the current popular taste in music is jarring. Because that era was defined by trap beats and bedroom pop and you don’t really hear a lot of that anymore.
And I was a bit confused as to how that could be jarring when I think trends came in organic, certain albums and songs would come up and you can see how that led to other music. But there was a lot of people agreeing with it. And some of them were mourning that time period and how we don’t have music like that anymore.
And I relate it to this because superhero movies were dominant around the same time and now other stuff is popular. But I don’t feel it in my own taste. I take everything individually, every movie every song whatever.
That being said this isn’t good lol. And there hasn’t been a lot of good movies in the genre since 2019. But I’m sure ten years from now people who are teenagers are gonna talk about video game movies in a similar way.
I was never a superhero fan before movies made superheros popular. There was novelty in the shared connected universe of the MCU and I think that fueled its meteoric rise. Once that novelty wore off (and perhaps more importantly, the execution of that aspect of that MCU fell off a cliff), there was nothing to keep me and other people around anymore. These movies started to have the same problems their source material was already notorious for: Constant reboots, meaningless deaths, and convoluted interconnected storylines that end up going nowhere.
I don't think superhero movies are automatically bad, it just takes more to get me interested in one now that the novelty is gone and the average quality is kinda in the toilet. Supergirl actually sounds like a movie I would really like, if the execution was good, but it sounds like it isn't.
If you’re interested, the graphic the movie is based on is fantastic. Woman of Tomorrow
For me, a good superhero movie was always about the traditional hero arc (underdog protagonist loses, gets powers, wins, game service action scenes, big blockbuster showdown, power ballad over credits), with an indulgent dose of justice fantasy. It was always a formula with limited life, and it's definitely been squeezed to where what would have been a good superhero movie to be twenty years ago would now feel extremely formulaic and trite.
I also can no longer connect with the justice fantasy, whether due to age or just the current state of the world.
It’s probably the age thing. At the end of the day this stuff is essentially YA, it’s fiction for teenagers.
Superhero stories certainly can age up and have plenty of complexity, but they've mostly gotten dumber over time. They usually go for cheap bits that're easier to understand. The memes get mimicked without understanding what made the original iconic.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I adore the book/series it’s based on. It’s good reading in part because the characters show growth and change over the course of the story. Trying to lock one of the characters into a single descriptive word is then is only a characterization for one part of the story, not the whole thing. Maybe not for Lobo, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t in the original but I can see how he would be a good addition.
The film cost $170 million to make. Calling it a failure for making almost half that on opening weekend seems to me to be more of a statement about the marketing than the movie. For the most part, female superhero movies have a harder time; the first one came out less than a decade ago. The studios held back because they didn’t think these movies would be profitable, then they waited until folks were burned out to actually make them.
Ah yes, the good old self-fulfilling prophecy.
"We can't make another female-led superhero movie...they always bomb!"
(nevermind the Vogon-like marketting and timing)
I know the numbers are such that it doesn’t seem bad. But the studio isn’t taking all of that gross, even without counting the marketing, the movie theaters take a cut of that gross.
And because the film is so poorly received it’s probably not gonna make even the budget amount, let alone the 375M break even point that’s been reported in trades.
Superman is always fascinating to me. Here is a person who is completely invincible unless you have a magical MacGuffin (kryptonite). So either you have this MacGuffin or you have no stakes. This always made Superman the most boring superhero to me unless they can think up a clever way to makes interesting stakes.
I still watch the movies because I guess I hate myself? I don't know. The moment I saw them introduce the new Supergirl I knew it was entirely so they could have a spin off movie. "Hey look, it's Superman but with an attitude". It's a shame that this gets dumped on a female character. It might have been interesting if they reversed tropes. Let's have Superman be something closer to like a Hancock character and Supergirl can be the super serious saviour of the world. That might have been interesting, as much as I assume that will never happen.
Anyways, I guess this is just a long rant to say I'm not surprised that Supergirl is a flop.
The trick to a good Superman is to make the stakes something his invincibility can't solve. This applies to other super heroes as well even when they aren't invincible. The Dark Knight works in part because Batman can't just brute force a solution to the problems presented in the film. He has to choose between saving Harvey and saving Rachel. A big part of act 3 needs the people on the two boats to make the right choice while he hunts down the Joker. These conflicts provide highly effective tension without needing Batman himself to be in any personal physical danger.
Superman is a foil to the American obsession with violence. He's invincible, but powerless to face the problems that really matter without losing his conviction that "might makes right" is evil. Yes, he could punch Lex Luthor's face into a mist, and we all might want to see it on some level, but Superman is there to remind everyone that it's wrong. Real solutions are more complicated than that.
None of the character decisions about Kara were made for this film either. They're adapting a very well-regarded comic series.
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of how the movie came about. It’s not like they made up this premise - it’s an adaptation of the Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow comic series, which was very well received.
Obviously the movie did not execute well, but Supergirl being jaded was not something they invented for the movie. It’s part of her character arc in one of the most critically acclaimed comics that she’s in, especially as the primary hero.
I do think it's an odd choice, just after Superman did so well for not being the jaded dark version, to choose to adapt this story. I've heard good things about the comic, but I also don't think it's the right tone for a supergirl story right now when we've seen everything do the "actually everything sucks so i'll drink my problems away" approach.
I don’t know, I wouldn’t call it dark. Like I would describe it as a space western. They go to a variety of colorful alien worlds. Supergirl ain’t feeling it at the start, but, it’s like the same way Indiana Jones is jaded. It’s not a dark and gritty setting even if it is edgier than your average superhero comic.
Sure, dark is probably the wrong word, but that trope is very played out right now, and doubly so with how the trailers made it the entire focus. Yet another "how will they ever get their groove back" plot in a sea of them.
I think the difference is that Kara has never had a chance to find her groove, in the first place. The journey is about Kara figuring out who she really is, apart from Superman.
Well received by whom, though? Regular readers of superhero comics might find it a refreshing variation on a theme, but the rest of us expect Kal-El, his friends, and family to be reasonably wholesome, positive individuals, not dark and gritty cynics.
That’s just kind of pedantic tbh. For the most part no one knows anything about Supergirl, but that’s besides the point. The comic was acclaimed
What is pedantic about what I said? I differentiated between what hard core comics fans like and what the general public likes.
No because the user said the comic was acclaimed and your rebuttal was to dismiss the claim on the basis that normal people didn’t acclaim it or whatever. That’s pedantry and a nonsequitor. Normies don’t read comics and would therefore have very little knowledge of Superman’s extended family.
My read on their comment was more innocuous: that comic book readers and comic movie watchers are very different demographics. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the sentiment, since I haven't seen the movie.
It appears the general public liked it just fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergirl_(comic_book)#Supergirl:_Woman_of_Tomorrow_(2021%E2%80%932022)
They always go with the classic green stuff that makes him weak, but did you know there's bunch of varieties of Kryptonite?
Also, he's vulnerable to magic, can't see through lead, can be temporarily downed by high volt/amp electricity and certain types of radiation, he's weak if he's out of yellow sunlight for too long or exposed to red sunlight for long periods, he can be weakened by some drugs (if modified with green kryptonite), some viruses, he's got no natural defenses against telepathy/psionic attacks/some mind control, you can sometimes use his strengths against him (especially his super-sensitive hearing), and it's well-documented that he's not completely invulnerable: a sufficiently strong opponent could literally just beat him to death.
It's just that nobody ever reaches for any of this stuff outside of comics or the movies. It's just good ol' Green Kryptonite.
It was nice to see that as a thing in Supergirl, actually. Most of the times she's unable to do something are due to the stars on whichever planet she's on, or the star being blocked while in space. Green kryptonite takes a back seat. They also get her with some other tricks that are weakening but not incapacitating.
I am aware of some of those to some degree. As a person who has never read a comic in my life, my knowledge, or lack there of, comes entirely from movies and culture osmosis.
That's unfortunate. I was liking the vibe from the trailers, and quite enjoyed the Woman of Tomorrow comic so was hoping this would be a worthwhile watch during the current low point in superhero movies.
Unfortunately, I felt like they kept the beats of the original comic but missed the themes behind it, when they really should have done it the other way around.
I went in wanting to like the movie so much, but all I could feel was disappointment, walking out. But I also know I'm not being objective and judging the movie on its own merits because I can't help but compare it to the comic.
Story aside, though, Millie Alcock absolutely killed it as Kara and I definitely want to see a lot more of her in the DCU.