There is a moment, deep in the murk of Supergirl‘s climax, where the screen turns the exact color of a phone left face-down on wet concrete mixed with shades of a CGI Sahara Desert. A few aliens brawl. Something explodes that was probably a spaceship. A bafflingly melodramatic cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” plays over the top of it all, gently reassuring nobody in particular not to write themselves off yet. And you who are sitting there in the dark, just really hoping for this film to be either as enjoyable as a cheesy space flick from the 2000s with shoddy CGI or as emotionally astounding as its source adaptation, just fully check out.
There is a real void that exists in this genre when it comes to female-led films, so naturally, when you criticize these few superhero films with female protagonists for being incompetently made, the obvious rebuttal from the fans will be that you are coming from a misogynistic place. And that is surely a genuine and reasonable concern, because quite a lot of the hate for films like The Marvels and Supergirl is fueled by the alt-right anti-woke crowd. All that, while true, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t criticize something for very clearly being poorly made.
Female superheroes deserve better; Milly Alcock’s performance certainly deserved better. That’s why the whole ordeal surrounding Supergirl feels so glum — from the way it looks, to the way the script just limps from point A to point B, and the fact that it was actually placed between the releases of Toy Story 5 and Minions. Seriously, how hard is it for Warner Bros. execs to figure out that placing a film about a superhero that the general public doesn’t care much about in a stacked summer that sees the release of the new Nolan film and the new Spider-Man film, and cramping it between two family-friendly nostalgia-heavy franchises was mostly always going to end up with middling results for DC?
Supergirl Went from $37M Opening to $630K in Five Weeks
Supergirl opened to $37.1 million domestically and $62.6 million worldwide, against a breakeven point well north of $400 million. Since then, it has been in continuous free fall. Its second weekend haul was just $8.6 million. Its third weekend was so thin, $3.7 million from 2,584 screens, that it was beaten by Olivia Wilde’s arthouse film “The Invite,” which made $5.72 million from just 1,610 screens that week.
In its fifth weekend, Supergirl has now collapsed to a mere $630,000 and fallen out of the box office top 10 altogether. This film is a nine-figure tentpole that even shoehorned in Jason Momoa as Lobo to help sell it, but it currently sits at only $124 million worldwide. It is now set to end its run with the lowest box-office figures for any DC movie since Catwoman.
DC and Warner Bros. Set to Lose Over $230 million with Supergirl
By its fourth week, Shazam! Fury of the Gods had made $129 million. Morbius, the genre’s own saint of humiliation, had made $155 million. Supergirl is now trailing both of them and would not even be touching the Morbius figures, even if the film is in theatres all Summer, and that film still had a production budget of only $75 million.
Supergirl, on the other hand, reportedly has a production budget of $170 million, with an additional $120 million spent on prints and advertising, putting its total cost to $290 million.
At this rate, by the most generous of estimates, the film will end its run with less than $75 million domestically and $55 million internationally. Based on the industry standard revenue split between theaters — 50% domestic and 40% international — the film is sitting on a theatrical revenue of less than 60 million, which puts it at a loss of $230 million (total production budget minus revenue), taking into account the legs of a film that are non-existent at this point.
It will not, mercifully, become a meme in the way Morbius did. Nobody is going to shout “it’s Supergirl time” ironically outside a multiplex, but in all likelihood, we won’t be seeing another Supergirl solo outing for a long while.
It is hard to imagine that, for all of Gunn’s promise, just the second film in his DC tenure would come out the other end with a story — versions of which have been done countless times in the comic-book genre within the last 15 years — but this time feeling more generic, and looking like it was filmed inside a Tupperware container that somebody forgot to wash.
I guess this is the sound and the color of a modern blockbuster failure: not a bang, not even a whimper, because that could still be enjoyable, but just an unremarkable, slightly-worse-than-average CGI greyfest, the on-screen equivalent of a shrug.
All this is not to write James Gunn off just yet, because Clayface does look different, unique, and like something that could work very well among both fans and critics. Most importantly and thankfully, it only costs $50 million.