Supergirl’s Box Office Failure Isn’t As Bad As You May Think
Kara plays by her own rules.
It makes perfect sense that Supergirl is getting compared to 2025’s Superman. Kara Zor-El was created to be a female counterpart to her cousin, and her big movie was directly teased in the final moments of Superman. However, the audience response to the two movies has been very different: in its first weekend, Superman earned $125 million at the domestic box office, while Supergirl only managed to bring in $38 million.
So what caused this big change only a year later? Was it the comparison to Superman itself? Changing theater-going habits as a whole? Good old-fashioned sexism? The true answer may, in fact, be something else entirely, as a statement from DC Studios co-president Peter Safran reveals.
Peter Safran and James Gunn are disappointed but not discouraged by Supergirl’s performance.
In a statement to The New York Times, Safran did concede that Supergirl’s initial performance did fall short of the mark. “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,” he said.
The first part of that sentence is very straightforward, but the second part is hard to decipher. Of course, Supergirl is part of a long-term strategy; it’s the second movie in what is set to be a gigantic franchise. Is this just, as the kids say, cope? Is it a desperate attempt to try and spin the underperformance as all according to plan?
Safran may actually have a point. There’s one element that’s often left out when the performance of these two movies is compared: budget. Superman was a glitzy, high-profile blockbuster directed by James Gunn himself with a budget of $225 million. (Side note: this is actually a lot lower than other comparable movies because of James Gunn’s meticulous filmmaking style.)
Supergirl may not have been a Superman-level hit, but DC is taking a more long-term view.
Supergirl, on the other hand, has an estimated budget of around $170 million, meaning an underperformance isn’t as impactful as a bigger project. While this movie may not have put as many butts in seats as the DC execs may have hoped, that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a complete surprise. Starting a new franchise is full of risks, and not every movie is going to be a smash hit. But if the MCU stopped at the first movie that wasn’t an absolute hit, we wouldn’t have gotten Endgame. Massive franchises are born of long-term plans, not a winning streak.
As much as the end-of-year charts may imply otherwise, the box office isn’t the only way to measure a film’s success. There are countless criteria — budget, word-of-mouth, cultural clout — that also factor into big decisions. Supergirl may not have set any records, but it was never meant to. It’s just the next building block in something much bigger.
