A year after Superman relaunched the DC Universe to general relief, Supergirl has become its first real setback. Craig Gillespie's film opened on 26 June to a $38 million domestic weekend and, by late August, had reached $126 million worldwide against a budget reported at up to $186 million before marketing. Deadline put the studio's projected loss at around $125 million. The awkward part is that most people who saw it liked its lead.
What is Supergirl about?
It adapts Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Tom King and Bilquis Evely's 2021 miniseries, which is one of the better DC comics of the last decade. Milly Alcock's Kara Zor-El, introduced briefly in Superman, is drifting through space on her twenty-third birthday with Krypto when a pirate named Krem, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, poisons the dog. She falls in with Ruthye, a young girl played by Eve Ridley, who is hunting Krem for killing her father, and the film becomes a road trip about whether revenge is something a hero is allowed to want. Jason Momoa is Lobo. David Corenswet's Superman appears.
How was it received?
Mixed, and consistently so. It sits at 54% on Rotten Tomatoes, 49 on Metacritic, and a B- on CinemaScore, which is the lowest grade the new DC Studios has taken. The praise is almost entirely for Alcock, who critics have called winning, funny and charismatic, and for Momoa's Lobo, which has the chaotic energy the character needed. The complaints are structural: fragmented editing that flattens the story, a script several reviewers found weak, and action that is flat when the comic it draws from is anything but. Krypto and Lobo are both described as underused, which for a film selling itself on both is a problem.
Why did it underperform?
Partly timing. It opened five weeks before Spider-Man: Brand New Day and in the shadow of Superman's first anniversary, with a character most of the audience had met for ninety seconds. Partly the material: Woman of Tomorrow is a quiet, literary comic, and the film has to decide whether to honour that or sell a summer blockbuster, and it tries to do both. Warner Bros. will draw its own conclusions. The most likely one is that Alcock has survived the film, and the film has not.
What is next for DC?
Clayface, the horror-leaning Batman spin-off, was moved from September to 23 October to sit closer to Halloween. Man of Tomorrow, the Superman sequel, is set for July 2027. Lanterns, the HBO Max series, has been delayed without a new date. Whether Supergirl reaches HBO Max on the studio's usual eleven-week window would put it around mid-September, but nothing has been announced.
Worth seeing?
For Alcock, yes. As a film, it is the DCU's first wobble rather than its first disaster, and the comic it is based on remains the better way to spend an evening.
Halidom's DC editions include Supergirl and Lobo from the film.