What a difference a year makes. Last summer, amid its record-breaking year, Warner Bros. relaunched its DC Comics properties with DC Studios’ co-chair James Gunn’s Superman — a July release that grossed $624.3 million worldwide and $354.1 million in North America (the third-highest total for any stateside release last year). This summer, as a follow-up, the studio released Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl… which flopped. The critically derided Superman spinoff — starring Milly Alcock, who also appeared in Gunn’s movie — opened with just $38 million in North America and $60 million worldwide against a reported budget of more than $170 million. It’s now one of several Warner Bros. titles this year (including The Bride! and Mortal Kombat II) to drastically underperform for the studio. “This movie needs to get to at least about $350 to $400 million to make any sense theatrically — an ROI at the box office which would be a 4x multiple from opening weekend, which is a big leap for this movie or any movie,” Sean McNulty notes. Supergirl, unfortunately, missed with audiences, who gave it a B-minus grade on CinemaScore — worse than previous DC superhero flops Black Adam and The Flash. “Supergirl is just not even close to A-level IP from the comic books,” says Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz, who joined Sean on today’s episode of Monday Morning Quarterbacks. “And the DC universe, such as it is, does not yet have the cachet and excitement among fans that people would turn out for anything the way they did in the 2010s for C-list Marvel IP. So that’s one problem.” The other problem? “The movie is bad,” Ben adds. “There’s just no getting around the critics, the fans. There’s unanimity that this is a bad movie.” As Ben points out, bad movies don’t always flop — Paramount’s Scary Movie earned a C+ grade on CinemaScore and has still topped $100 million in North America and $200 million worldwide. “But it’s hard to generate excitement when the word is out that this movie is bad,” Ben adds, “and because there’s so much intense fandom — some of it toxic — around comic book movies, the bad reviews just feel like they really got heightened on social media in a way they don’t for some other movies.” Gunn’s co-chair at DC Studios, Peter Safran, went so far as to issue a statement to the New York Times about the movie’s failure to meet “box office expectations” — but it doesn’t mean DC is necessarily in trouble. DC Studios has the horror movie Clayface coming out in September, and then a Superman sequel next year. But Supergirl is probably grounded. “I think it’s safe to say that when the movie has got mediocre word-of-mouth and poor reviews, it’s cooked,” Ben says. “So it’s fair to say this film is cooked.” |
