Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it *shudders* DC Studios’ first flop? That’d be a ‘no’, another ‘no’, and unfortunately a ‘quite possibly’. Yes, this past weekend saw Cruella and I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl, starring the ace Milly Alcock, swoop into multiplexes the world over. But as Toy Story 5 continues to fly at the box office and Obsession remains everybody’s latest obsession, Superman’s cousin Kara Zor-El struggled to break through in its opening weekend, landing just $68 million worldwide against a reported $170 million budget.
To put Supergirl’s disappointing box office open into some sort of context, Sony’s widely derided SPUMC offering Morbius managed $84 million worldwide in its own opening weekend, while the old DCEU’s last non-sequel solo superhero effort, The Flash, took $131 million despite mixed reviews. DC Studios’ own first film, last year’s Superman, took off to the tune of $217 million — albeit with a much more cinematically well-established hero at its centre. As for Supergirl then, which has been met with widespread enthusiasm about Milly Alcock’s take on Kara Zor-El but lukewarm responses from critics to Gillespie’s movie itself, a sub-$100 million open — with only $38 million being made domestically — is more than a tad concerning. Especially if, as Variety reports, the movie realistically needs to make $300 million to break even at the box office.
Still, despite a less-than-super opening weekend, Supergirl’s financial success — or lack thereof — isn’t keeping DC Studios’ co-CEO Peter Safran up at night. In an interview with The New York Times, Safran downplayed the potential repercussions of the DCU’s sophomore feature flopping. “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,” said Safran. Said long-term strategy includes this October’s Clayface, next summer’s Superman sequel Man Of Tomorrow, and Matt Reeves’ very long awaited The Batman Part II.
So, Supergirl hasn’t been quite the blockbuster hit DC Studios might’ve anticipated, likely due to a multitude of factors — from ongoing superhero fatigue, to the competition it faced against the likes of Toy Story and Obsession, to a very vocal minority’s pre-meditated backlash to the existence of a woman-fronted superhero movie (this is, after all, a very different landscape culturally and cinematically to that which saw Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel fly.) But here’s the bright side. The film exists. Milly Alcock has a major part to play in Man Of Tomorrow. And the DCU is still only just getting started. No cause for panic then — at least not just yet, anyway….