Looks like a $37M US opening weekend for Supergirl and sub $30M in the rest of he World. For comparison Morbius opened to $39M in the US.
I’m astounded that DC tried yet another Cinematic Universe after totally and repeatedly fucking up the last one and at a time when people are abandoning the MCU, the only really successful one.
I’m kind of dumbfounded that they followed up Superman with Supergirl, a character who most people see as a knock off of the other one and who was never that popular to begin with.
I’ve been reading online it’s the “best” Supergirl story? People praise the art and colours, which do like nice, unlike the drab looking film. Plot does sound a bit depressing though.
The issue is doing another Super movie. Who fucking cars at this point. Honestly, they should give up on the shared world stuff. Just make sequels not universe films.
Is your comic book film about an A-list character?
Has said character established a film franchise prior to 2019?
If the answer to both these questions is no then the absolute box office ceiling for your film is probably Thunderbolts and the floor is something like Blue Beetle. The sooner studios figure this out and accept it the better. In the meantime we’ll just get more tedious culture war discourse over this one tanking.
not seen it but I feel like it’s extremely marketed towards men and they dgaf about Supergirl so it’s flopped
I’d watch the shit out of a Supergirl film that leaned into the girl aspect of it, and she’s a big enough icon that it would probably do decently well but yeah it’s just never gonna hit anything like Superman/Batman numbers and the last Superman film didn’t do too well I think?
Superman last year did well, $618 million in the current environment for comic book films that aren’t Batman or Spider-Man is a decent total (pretty much all the difference between that and Man of Steel’s box office is the China box office between the two), though unsurprisingly the box office was rather US-heavy. But films for B/C-list characters that aren’t already firmly established (like GOTG) just aren’t going to be mega-smashes any more yeah, and I don’t think studios have really got the message yet.
The superhero films seem to be lacking in star power these days tbh. For the first time in a while it seems like there’s a popular set of young A-list actors who make a big contribution to box office (Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, Jacob Elordi, Anya Taylor-Joy (?))… and what unites them all is that they avoid superhero films like the plague.
Funny that someone said Thunderbolts is the ceiling for B-tier superhero films when that’s the one that starred Florence Pugh who I reckon is in the same group as the above.
Only the first of those two carry real star power I think, no way the other three could get films like The Drama or Challengers or Marty Supreme to strong box office, at the moment in their careers anyway
What would “leaning into the girl aspect of ii” involve? Just curious.
Women in general are an underserved audience and considering they are a little over 50% of humanity, you think studios would cotton on…
Movies starring women which are more the sorts of movies women watch have the potential to break out - DWP2, Wicked, Barbie, Colleen Hoover adaptations etc. Action type movies of whatever subcategory, with female leads, often don’t do as well but are watched by more men than women.
So, how would you make a Supergirl movie, which is still a superhero movie, which appealed to women? Not saying it can’t be done, as a bloke I am not the best person to come up with these ideas.
Popped it in the general film chat - but I actually had a pretty decent time with Supergirl despite how aggressively average it was for the majority of its run time. The stuff on Krypton was good, the first half was fun, Alcock is decent in the role. The young actress in it is sadly quite poor, and it feels kinda half baked throughout. Momoa feels like he’s been beamed in from a Schumacher movie. It would’ve worked gangbusters as a Phase 2 Marvel but not sure that cuts it nowadays. As for the pooch stuff, my dog looks like this so I was always gonna be in the tank for it…
Not sure how much this necessarily matters. I mean Iron Man and Thor were not big names and I recall no one expected GotG or Ant-Man to go down that well.
Not seen Supergirl mind, but I just mean I don’t think this is the issue as much. There certainly is a fatigue (or something) I think with fantastical stuff (not just superheroes).
Context. It’s not 2008, OK, we had had almost a decade of superhero movies from X-Men in 2000 but now we’ve 18 more years of SH movies and media, I’d guess over 50 movies and possibly hundreds of hours of episodes of TV since the first Iron Man.
Iron Man et al were an experiment that paid off. The DCEU was a series of missteps akin to Sideshow Bob repeatedly stepping onto rakes. Granted the first WW and Aquaman movies were successes and the first Suicide Squad was a surprise hit despite no one seeming to like it. Even the MCU has thoroughly cocked-up since Endgame, and the billion dollars or so Disney are ploughing into Doomsday and Secret Wars is the nuclear option and desperate. Furthermore there have been those awful Sony movies further poisoning the comic/superhero well.
My point is, it’s even harder to make successful Superhero movies now, let alone a shared universe. Overexposure, saturation, poor quality and the simple march of time determine that their era is over. I suspect Spiderman and Batman are big enough to survive, likely no one else.
It’s less the fact that Supergirl is comparatively more obscure, though that is a factor. It’s the fact that they want all these interconnected movies and they are following Superman with Supergirl, it would be like following Spiderman with Spiderwoman or Batman with Batwoman or Spider-someone else or Bat-whatever. Movies need to be sold on a relatively simple premise and the premise is too similar to the average filmgoer. The character might well be very different in their characterisation but the average person doesn’t know this and it will be harder to make them care than with a more distinct protagonist.
That said, they were starting from a truly cursed place after the DCEU, I can see why they led with Superman: of the big DC three, they couldn’t do Batman due to wanting to move forward with Matt Reeves’s much delayed Batman sequel and WW had had a widely panned sequel in 2020, so I can see wanting to leave a longer gap before they reboot her.
The Clayface mid-budget horror is a good idea but it might actually be hurt by the DC association. I think Gunn is further digging a hole with the Superman sequel coming out next summer, with an appearance by Supergirl. A third “Super” prefix movie in as many summers with Superman and Supergirl in all of them…
Also (and I don’t really know what I’m talking about here as I’m in no way a DC fan, but here goes) there was also that long running Supergirl series that became part of the Arrowverse and while maybe it wasn’t seen much over here (maybe? I’ve seen DVDs for sale but don’t remember if it was on TV) that seemed a bit low rent and maybe that has affected people’s desire to see the film. Or not, just a thought. Is there anything in this ill thought out idea?
Yeah, same tbh. Thought it was pretty formulaic but Milly Alcock was a whole lot of fun in the role and I liked the grimy locations, they all felt very Star Wars.
If you made Guardians of the Galaxy now no way would it be a huge smash. The 2010s ‘pretty much everything is a big hit’ peak for comic book films is long gone.
