DC Studios was supposed to have saved itself. After years of running the franchise into the dirt with bloated budgets and third-rate CGI fests, James Gunn and Peter Safran promised a clean slate. They started off with a moderately successful $600 million run for Superman last year, in what is arguably the third worst Superman movie ever made. But the newly minted DCU has already stepped directly into its first major rake, and it has nobody to blame but itself.
Supergirl debuted this past weekend to a dismal $38 million domestically, falling off a cliff compared to the initial $50 million projections. For a movie with a massive $170 million production budget (not including marketing costs), this is a flat-out disaster. Globally, the film managed a weak $68 million opening, coming in second place to a second-week run of Toy Story 5.
Compared to previous DC trainwrecks, a $38 million opening puts Supergirl squarely in the same category as Joker: Folie à Deux ($37 million) and well below the opening of the disastrous The Flash ($55 million).
Audience reception has been equally brutal, and the YouTube reviewers have uninimously panned the film as being poorly written, ugly to look at, and that the Milly Alcock’s Supergirl was unlikable.
But the real story isn’t just the terrible box office returns. It is the absolute public relations suicide conducted by the film’s lead actress, Milly Alcock, during her pre-release press tour.
Antagonizing the “Christian Dad”
In a bizarre press cycle with intellectual heavyweights like Vanity Fair and Variety, Alcock spent her time whining about online critics. She claimed that “simply existing as a woman in that space is something that people comment on,” and went on to mock the type of people who were skeptical of her casting or the direction of the film.
Speaking directly to Variety, Alcock dismissed her critics by categorizing them as faceless, online trolls:
“It’s from a lot of people whose profiles have no photo, who are burner accounts. Or someone’s name and then ‘Dad of four, Christian,’ which is hilarious to me. But I mean, whose opinion do you really care about? If you’re pissing the right kind of people off, you’re doing OK.”
This is the standard, exhausting playbook we have seen from Hollywood for the last decade. If your film is terribly written and the fans aren’t excited about it, immediately pivot to identity politics. Label your potential audience as “toxic” and frame their lack of interest as a moral failing.
But Alcock’s comments are especially revealing. She found the concept of a “Christian, Dad of four” being a critic to be “hilarious.” She actively bragged that “pissing the right kind of people off” meant she was “doing OK.”
Well, those “Christian dads” she found so amusing decided to do something else with their weekend. They stayed home, and they brought their families with them.
Go Woke Go Broke
Hollywood has forgotten a very basic rule of business: you do not insult the people you are trying to sell a product to. And Supergirl as a concept was already a woke genderswap comic.
A $170 million four-quadrant superhero movie cannot survive on the approval of progressive film journalists and isolated Twitter blue-checks. It requires families. It requires fathers taking their children to the theater on a Saturday afternoon. When the face of your movie openly ridicules Christian fathers and brags about alienating them, you do not get to cry about “superhero fatigue” when those exact fathers refuse to buy a ticket.
Safran reportedly called Alcock during the press tour to tell her she was “handling it beautifully.” If by “beautifully” Safran meant tanking a multi-million-dollar franchise reset in its infancy, then she did a spectacular job.
After this opening weekend, the receipts are clear. The cultural-war narrative Hollywood loves to deploy to shield weak blockbusters serves only to ensure they crash and burn. DC wanted a punk-rock, “super tough” heroine who has “been through some shit.” Instead, they got a box office bomb and a swift lesson in basic economics.
