The Real Reason For Supergirl’s Box Office

Milly Alcock is only the second actress to portray Supergirl in her own solo film on the big screen, apart from Helen Slater in 1984, 42 years ago.

Whenever a comic book movie underperforms at the box office, the overthinking begins from all corners. Was it marketed properly? Was there too much competition around the release date? Was there bad buzz and word-of-mouth leading up to its release?

The reason you see on social media that never makes sense is, "the movie was bad," which never explains how people who didn’t buy tickets on opening weekend somehow knew the movie itself wasn’t any good. Of course, the box office only measures popularity, not subjective quality, so that reason is always dead on arrival, factually speaking. That said, it would be shortsighted to ignore the impact of early word-of-mouth or social media buzz. Even before most people have seen the film, initial reactions—positive or negative—from critics, influencers, or early audiences can quickly shape public attitude and either boost excitement or weaken interest among casual moviegoers.

And then there’s the reason almost everyone ignores that truthfully ends up being the bullseye a lot of the time: “The hero isn’t that popular with the general audience.” This is clearly the case with Supergirl.

A $63 million global opening weekend for a $175 million budgeted film isn’t great by any stretch. Still, while people point to their personal agendas to explain why Supergirl didn’t fly high out of the gate, they’re all overlooking the objective fact that this is the first solo film for Supergirl since 1984. That’s a 42-year gap for the Maiden of Might on the big screen. It’s worth noting that the 1984 film was both a commercial and critical disappointment, failing to launch the character into a major movie franchise. This lack of initial success just deepened Supergirl’s absence from mainstream cinema, making her return now even more of an uphill climb.

Putting aside how utterly ridiculous a gap of more than four decades is between solo movies, one could argue that at least Supergirl had a gap, since countless other DC heroes still haven’t taken the spotlight in cinemas. Still, bypassing two full generations of your audience on the big screen is going to make your character look like she’s never had a movie in the first place. How many Millennials and Gen Z in the general audience even know who Helen Slater is, much less that she was the first Kara Zor-El in theaters years before they were born?

You’re going to call BS on this, because Supergirl was in Smallville, she’s been in numerous DC animated projects, and Melissa Benoist had six full seasons of her own show on CBS and The CW from 2015-2021. How could the general audience not know who she is?

Easy. The general audience largely never watched them. CW haters spent years complaining about how the Arrowverse could exist, with years of lower ratings that never challenged the other big networks, and now the flipside is that it proves Supergirl was never on the general audience’s radar. The first season averaged around 9 million viewers on CBS. Still, after moving to the CW, it settled into a much smaller audience, with viewership hovering closer to 1.5 million per episode by the final season, far below the numbers seen by big broadcast hits. That was a live-action network show that a lot of pretentious DC fans consistently skewered for its mood and VFX, among other things. If the general audience wasn’t watching that, then they weren’t watching the DC Animated Universe either.

You’re still going to call BS, because what about Marvel movies? How did James Gunn make billions with the Guardians of the Galaxy? How did Ant-Man get a trilogy? Hasn’t the MCU proved that you can make money with lesser-known heroes?

First off, Guardians of the Galaxy was the 10th MCU movie, four films after Marvel Studios struck paydirt with a $1.5 billion haul from The Avengers. The MCU had freshly captured the general audience’s attention after the first full phase had finished. Ant-Man didn’t debut as the 12th MCU film until after Avengers: Age of Ultron was released in 2015.

Supergirl is, of course, the DCU’s SECOND film, so there’s really no comparison in terms of franchise equity.

Ok, so what about the MCU’s second film, The Incredible Hulk? It still had a bigger domestic opening ($55M) in 2008 than Supergirl did.

Right, but it wasn’t the first Hulk solo movie. Remember the Ang Lee-directed version starring Eric Bana in 2003? That’s only a 5-year gap, and, funny enough, it had a bigger domestic opening weekend than the MCU version by $7 million ($62M).

Plus, The Incredible Hulk had the benefit of the classic and well-known The Incredible Hulk TV series that ran on CBS from 1977 to 1982, starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, giving Gen X’ers an opening to see it. However, it still brought in only $265 million globally, making it the second-lowest-grossing MCU film to date.

All of this is to say that Supergirl, more than anything, needs a new foothold with the general audience. When you have news sites and non-Hollywood trades literally calling her “the female Superman” in headlines, completely dismissing her unique character traits and giving the general audience the impression that she’s just a female version of Superman, there’s clearly a problem with the character not having much of a presence to the uninitiated. If you don’t know about her more turbulent past as an adolescent who witnessed Krypton’s destruction, and how that has formed her character far more differently than Superman, then that’s going to lead to less interest in a first movie, especially a year after Superman's return to the big screen.

So then why did DC Studios choose Supergirl for their second DCU film? Because it’s part of their long-term plan, and this is why it was important for Peter Safran, co-head of DC Studios, to make his statement after Supergirl’s opening weekend:

“While Supergirl didn’t meet our box office expectations, it’s just one component of a broader, long-term strategy at DC Studios that we remain confident in.”

It’s telling that Safran addressed this so quickly, especially on the heels of Amazon reassuring fans that a sequel to the recent Masters of the Universe film is still planned, despite the movie earning just $109 million worldwide. Kevin Wilson, the head of Amazon Studios, in fact called it “a solid start” and said, “This opening is exactly the kind of critical first moment that validates our holistic distribution strategy – building awareness and engagement that will carry well beyond the theatrical window.”

Now, that’s more than what Safran said, but it’s essentially the same statement. Amazon, a trillion-dollar business that doesn’t rely on moviemaking, can afford to be more patient in building an audience for He-Man with generations that never really latched onto him after the 80s cartoon, despite multiple animated series in decades since.

In DC Studios case, we know that Gunn and Safran have an 8-10 year plan for the DCU, detailed enough to not only get them hired, but to greenlight multiple projects to the point where they are currently filming the franchise’s 4th movie, Man of Tomorrow, while the third movie, Clayface, sits in post-production awaiting an October release, and throw in the Lanterns HBO series in August as well.

So while everyone else argues to defend their own reasons for why Supergirl is apparently the biggest bomb of wokery in Hollywood history, and how it somehow proves that James Gunn’s DCU is dead before it even gets going, it looks like the studio itself understands that Supergirl is a brand new character for the general audience to absorb. While she might not get another solo movie anytime soon, her appearances in the DCU going forward could go a long way in building that foothold for her with the general audience, starting with the ones who DID spend $63 million to see her movie in the first place, and then more who will surely watch Supergirl on HBO Max later this year.