Supergirl has all the same powers as her cousin: She’s faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive. Oh, and forget about jumping tall buildings in a single bound: The woman can fly.
But all those superpowers weren’t enough to launch her movie past Toy Story 5. Not even close.
For the second straight weekend, Toy Story 5 topped the weekend’s box office. It buzzed to another $70 million in North America, pushing its total domestic gross to $297.2 million. It’s done nearly as well overseas, too—so much so that if you look at its global gross, it stands at a dynamic $585 million. That’s a total that even Emperor Zurg might appreciate.
Supergirl, meanwhile, struggled to make much of a dent.
The estimated $38 million that Supergirl earned seems respectable enough—until you consider that DC and Warner Bros. spent at least $170 million making the thing, not counting marketing costs. It’s an extraordinarily dismal start for a modern superhero flick. According to Deadline Hollywood, Supergirl barely outearned the opening weekend of DC’s Joker: Folie a Deux ($37.6 million), and it fell short of The Marvels’ $46.1 million opening, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s lowest effort.
Supergirl didn’t do any better internationally, either, earning $30 million overseas to punch up its worldwide gross to a measly $68 million. The film’s performance was so subpar that DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran said as much to The New York Times: “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.”
Of course, superheroes are famous for getting back up after getting knocked down. So perhaps Supergirl can shake off this bit of box-office kryptonite yet.
Fans continue to be obsessed with Obsession. The horror flick earned another $9.8 million to finish third, shoving its overall domestic tally to $233.9 million.
Jacka–: Best and Last certainly can’t add the word Richest to its title. The $8.4 million that the film took home in North America makes it the lowest debut for any film in the franchise. It took a dramatic pratfall and landed in fourth place.
Disclosure Day closed out the top five with an $8.1 million weekend stateside. Steven Spielberg’s latest has now earned $94.4 million in North America.
Looking down the list, we find a couple of other newcomers worth noting. BLEACH: Thousand-Year Blood War – The Calamity earned $3 million to finish eighth. Clearly, it would’ve done better with a longer title.
Finally, Lucky Strike proved, well, rather unlucky. The war film earned just about $777,000 to finish, appropriately enough, 13th.
7 Responses
Yeah, I was disappointed by Supergirl. I do not have children, but I always look at media through the lens of “If I were a parent would I let them watch this?” I have many friends and relatives that are always asking my opinion on age appropriateness for media. I absolutely told them “This new Supergirl movie should have been rated R.” It was definetly inspired by Mad Max, which is also rated R. If I had daughters, I would not let them watch it. I don’t want them thinking being a sailor mouthed, sarcastic alcoholic is a value to strive towards…….
Even beyond ‘not suitable for children,’ I’ve been telling many of my female friends, “You may not want to watch this movie because of [its subject matter],” which they appreciated.
‘Supergirl’ was one giant S.A. trigger almost from start to finish, and I fail to see at any level how on earth this got greenlit for an audience I would have thought would mostly consist of young girls. There’s nothing here that I think would empower them, by religious or even secular standards, and the movie ends in a worse place than where it started. The profanity didn’t help, the alcoholism (which I thought the movie gave a remarkably poignant context for, without justifying it) didn’t help, but those weren’t my main issues. Also, the movie needed a lot more character growth; I wasn’t convinced that any of the main characters learns anything of importance, and the film’s internal debate about the morality of vengeance did the same thing with the same cop-out that the otherwise enjoyable Wonder Woman 2017 movie did. And now the new ‘Minions’ movie is going to roll all over this, probably for two weeks (Moana might modestly do well, then ‘Odyssey’ is going to barrel through).
I have not seen Supergirl and she didn’t seem really likeable at the end of Superman last year, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions because I think Captain Marvel, Rose, and other girls in action movies sometimes get judged too harshly if they don’t show cleavage, although it’s sometimes due to the tendency to write women as having typically male personalities in action movies.
It’s disappointing I’m not really surprised to see your warning, Eric, about the film having S.A. triggers, because, well, it has the director James Gunn.
I wish there was a third movie about Billie Batson’s foster family or Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman mentoring a young superheroine. These might have to be low budget for DC to afford them, but they could be more of situational comedies and totally shake up the DC movie expectations. Or why not a Nightwing movie? Who doesn’t love watching an elite acrobat who has learned all the skills of Batman but has a better sense of humor? Nightwing (Dick Grayson, the original Robin) is nearly as old as Batman and the editor of DC Comics once said that he was kind of the heart of DC, but he still doesn’t have his own movie.
In mild point of fairness, Gunn did not direct this movie per se; Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya; Cruella; Lars and the Real Girl) did.
You’re right, Gunn is actually the main producer. Isn’t he supposed to have been given creative control over the DCU, though?
Plugged in, I am not sure the comment I wrote on Saturday was a good comment. I had worked all night the night before. Plugged In is a site I go to that finds positive qualities in the characters, even if those movie characters are not embraced by the culture at large, and I did not make this clear in my comment. Thank you.