Supergirl Felt Like A Super Misfire
The new Supergirl film has failed to light the world on fire in the way DC was probably hoping. This isn’t a good sign.
Personally, I have no beef with Supergirl. In fact, I want to like it despite all its flaws as a narrative. When I was a kid, I saw Helen Slater fly out of the sky in a red skirt and cape, and at that moment I suddenly realised who I wanted to marry. So I’m going to bat for any Supergirl nonsense, no matter how garbage it is. But the numbers don’t lie. People are calling it “2026’s Morbius”, which is not a title you want to be given. It’s looking like it’s going to make a net loss, earning $100 million worldwide at the time of writing and needing $400 million to break even. It had a substantial drop-off after its first weekend, which is not something you really come back from.
The original comic the movie was based on isn’t considered by fans to be a great screen introduction for Supergirl. It started life as True Grit in space, which sounds like it should have been a sure thing, but ended up folding Supergirl into the role of the grizzled, wiser character. In the film adaptation, she spends most of the running time unlikeable and out of her suit.
It turns out that DC had cold feet about this film months before it came out. They could see the writing on the wall. James Gunn, who directed Superman and has DC’s new universe in mind, had creative differences with Supergirl director Craig Gillespie. It all came to a head when the studio swooped in for nine days of reshoots and rewrites with Jeremy Slater, one of Gunn’s favourites. Some rejiggering and music massaging got its preview scores higher, but in the end the studio opted for a bake-off between two cuts, one by Gillespie and one by the studio, ultimately choosing its own. This mirrors the process that led to Suicide Squad’s atrocious cut. Somewhere out there, there’s a moody character-portrait version of Suicide Squad that isn’t trying to be upbeat and goofy, and we’ll never see it. Maybe there’s a version of Supergirl that lands with general audiences, but we’ll never see it.
“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,” Peter Safran told the New York Times.
Onwards and upwards. We’ll be getting a Man of Tomorrow film in 2027, and it looks like we’re getting Robert Pattinson’s The Batman Part II as well. So this isn’t the end of the line for Gunn’s DC-verse.