The Girl of Steel just got grounded — and it wasn’t pretty.“Supergirl,” the second film in James Gunn’s rebooted DC Universe, limped into theaters with a disastrous $38 million domestic opening weekend.
Against a production budget hovering around $170–186 million (plus tens of millions more in marketing), the movie is already on track to lose Warner Bros. and DC Studios a staggering $130–200 million.
That’s not a landing. That’s a crater.
While Gunn’s “Superman” last summer opened to a healthy $125 million domestically and went on to solid numbers, “Supergirl” couldn’t even muster a third of that.
International numbers were equally anemic, pushing the global weekend total to roughly $68 million, nowhere near enough to save this bird from financial freefall.
Hollywood’s favorite excuse, “audiences just don’t like superhero movies anymore”, doesn’t hold water. Fun, crowd-pleasing entries still print money when they deliver. What audiences are rejecting is the same old formula: preachy messaging, virtue-signaling, and stars who treat fans like the enemy.
Enter Milly Alcock.
The “House of the Dragon” actress spent months ahead of release complaining about supposed misogyny and “weird ownership over women’s bodies” whenever anyone dared criticize female-led projects. She doubled down, got defensive, and even suggested her character’s “queerness” during Pride-month press, complete with the line that Supergirl “probably goes both ways.”
Predictably, tracking collapsed. What started as optimistic projections in the $50–65 million range cratered to the low $40s, and reality came in even worse.
This isn’t an isolated case. It’s a pattern.
Remember “The Marvels”? Another big-budget bomb blamed on everything except the obvious: shoving identity politics and unlikable characters down audiences’ throats.
Disney’s live-action remakes keep bombing for the same reason. Studios keep hiring stars and writers more interested in scoring points with coastal elites than entertaining Middle America.The result? Audiences stay home. They’ve had enough of being lectured while paying $20 for a ticket and $8 for popcorn.
“Supergirl” isn’t even a particularly radical film by today’s standards, it’s just another forgettable, mediocre superhero outing that tries too hard to fit in and ends up fading out.
But when your lead actress spends the press tour proving exactly why people are tired of this nonsense, you’re not just fighting bad reviews. You’re fighting self-inflicted wounds.DC and Warner Bros. bet big on Gunn’s vision to rescue the universe after years of flops. One successful “Superman” doesn’t erase the damage when the follow-up immediately reminds everyone why the brand was in trouble to begin with.
The lesson is staring Hollywood in the face, yet they keep refusing to learn it: Stop making movies that lecture instead of entertain. Stop hiring stars who seem to despise the very fans they need. Stop treating comic-book icons as vehicles for personal political statements.
Until they do, expect more craters like this one.
Supergirl didn’t need to be a masterpiece. She just needed to be fun.
Instead, woke Hollywood delivered another expensive reminder that audiences have moved on, and they’re not coming back until the studios do too.
