It’s only a few days out, and Variety is helpfully chumming the box office shark waters with their headline:
‘Supergirl’ Braces for $100 Million Loss: What DC Studios Should Learn From Its Box Office Bomb
Which is slightly kinder than the article’s tab title reads:
Noble of the entertainment reporters to offer up their advice.
Their actual advice to studios for the next movie about a B- or C-tier superhero? (After pounding the movie into the ground for daring to exist)
“…they’ll need to economize on the production budget and marketing spend.”
Man. Such insight.
A 1,200+ word article and it comes down to advice my grandmother could’ve given, probably without even knowing what we were talking about.
“Spend less!”
Oy.
I saw Supergirl with my family, I was looking forward to it. I like Milly Alcock, I liked her version of Supergirl in the Superman movie as a tipsy party girl who refuses to make her dog behave, and I thought the trailers showed a clever angle: a woman with Superman’s powers, but who doesn’t share his optimism about humanity.
I agree with the general impressions of the movie: it’s missing something.
(Skip to the end if you want spoiler-ridden opinions as to what that “something” is.)
But my main grief with this article is that it boils down to: you took a chance, and you blew it! Fools! Ha-ha!
Well, hate to be Dr. Obvious here, but that’s every single movie ever made.
I have my suspicions as to why Supergirl is the current Patient Zero for What Ails the Superhero Movie Biz, and most of them boil down to politics, either of the national kind, or of the local showbiz kind, neither of which are currently charitable to any movie that falls outside traditional norms.
But one of the issues that I think is absolutely killing movies, is that studios have invested purely in the blockbuster, all-eggs-in-one-basket, THE BIGGEST EVENT MOVIE YOU’VE EVER SEEN, for every last major release.
Do you know, back in the olden days, there were actually movies that came out that weren’t intended to be THE BIGGEST EVENT MOVIE YOU’VE EVER SEEN?
Sure, studios HOPED they’d make a lot of cash, but they didn’t actually have to make a billion dollars to be considered “successful.”
That part drives me nuts - when I was in film school in the dinosaur ages of the late 90s, $100 million was considered STAGGERING. Like, if a movie made that, then they were entering film history.
Sure, inflation gins those prices up over time.
But Titanic blew that $100 million goal out of the water overnight, shooting it to over a billion dollars, and that goalpost shift accounts for a lot of heartache.
It wasn’t that people took the lesson, “Oh, well, that movie was extraordinary for whatever reason, a billion dollars is too great a number for just any movie to reach.”
No, they took the lesson, “Well, one movie did it, NOW ALL MUST DO IT.”
As of this moment, Supergirl has made somewhere in the arena of $80 million bucks. By comparison, Toy Story 5 has made $327 million, Obsession has made $238 million. So, Supergirl has lost the box office fight, by any comparison.
But Toy Story and Obsession, while having huge numbers, are nowhere near the most profitable films in history.
Obsession, it’s a low-budget film, it’s the exception. Anything over $50 million was gonna excite the studio, and that movie has over-performed like a mother. It’s really in a category all its own.
Toy Story 3 made over a billion smackeroos. So TS5, by comparison, must be a flop, right?
No, the same entertainment reporters are flouting it as a major success.
But, back up a touch. Keeping it in the Superman family, the movie Superman Returns, released in 2006, made around $400 million dollars, and was considered a flop.
Man of Steel, $670 million. Considered a hesitant “success,” enough to spawn the DC cinematic universe.
The 2025 Superman topped out around $625 million. Another hesitant success.
What I’m trying to demonstrate, is that ALL movies this summer have performed comparatively poorly, when you put them up against previous blockbusters.
But by being the weakest earner, Supergirl gets to be dogpiled.
What’s my point? Who knows. I didn’t even care about Supergirl that much, but I still find Hollywood’s gleeful joy in shitting on it to be tasteless.
And Milly Alcock is getting attacked as if she was the one who caused this atrocity. You’ve got the third-most forgettable Superman, Dean Cain, running his mouth about her and sounding like a dirty old man.
James Gunn’s position at WB just got more precarious, which is fair, he’s the boss, and that’s the risk. But he’s got Superman 2 already filming, so they can’t fire him, and if that movie is a success, all will likely be forgiven and forgotten.
And a movie that could’ve maybe been taken or left on its own merits will be flushed down the memory hole as a “failure.”
But, don’t give up hope, friends, for Hollywood also has a long-standing tradition of movies that got shat upon and spat upon, rising like phoenixes to glory, when years later, a new generation discovers them, or the previous generation says, “Oh. Hey. That movie wasn’t so bad. I guess I kinda liked it after all.”
I mean, that probably won't be my reaction, but you never can tell.
Okay, so after defending Supergirl’s honor, what did I think was missing?
Couple things: filmmakers need to quit depowering Kryptonians. A little kryptonite here and there, that’s part of the mythos, I get it, and I’m down for a little bit of depowering once a movie.
Not every five minutes, when they need to get Supergirl out of the game, or the movie would be over.
They basically have Supergirl depowered as the start of the movie, then, when she absolutely needs her powers, they get restored, only to be yanked away again right after.
Lather, rinse…
Like, Supergirl traveling acrost the galaxy only to land on a planet with a kryptonite moon (or sun? I couldn’t tell…), that was clever, make that the only time it happens in the movie.
But even with that, all she had to do was lie there dying all day, and when the moon passed out of orbit, she’s powered up again. Thank goodness nobody found her and pounded the snot out of her while she just lay there, helpless.
Or just died outright from hours of kryptonite poisoning. That was convenient.
Ever notice that kryptonite has never actually killed anyone in a Super movie?
Point the second, it was impossible to tell what power level anyone was at. Supergirl, even depowered in the beginning, still seemed as strong as Superman, and took a beating that would’ve crushed any normal human.
For that matter, her kid sidekick also managed to take a lot of abuse and never got more than a few scratches, and my impression was she was of normal, “human” strength.
Meanwhile, every other character in the movie gets hit with enough brute force to shatter a building, and they shake it off. Kinda kills the tension when you expect them to be turned into exploding bags of blood and bones by a super-punch, and they kinda go, “Uh. That stung.”
Lastly, filmmakers need to decide where they sit on the fence so far as superheroes killing folk. Supergirl spends long minutes agonizing on why her partner, a young girl who lost her family, shouldn’t kill the bad guy, only for Supergirl to just go ahead and do it for her.
Then she goes home to Earth, and tells Superman she’s now ready to assume her duties as a superhero.
I don’t get it.
Yeah, I know it’s a real struggle to not kill a bad guy who richly deserves it. But as many, many before me have pointed out, that’s the narrative problem we come to see play out. How does Superman (or Batman, or whoever) justify not killing their opponent, and if they won’t do it, what will they do to ensure that opponent doesn’t get loose and do it all over again?
Supergirl killing the bad guy doesn’t have the narrative “oomph” that it should. It feels like she vaguely ran out of options, and did it, and won’t lose sleep over it.
That’s what anyone would do, but a superhero needs to do more, no?
If she does lose sleep over it, then show us. That’s the movie. That was what I thought Man of Steel was trying to accomplish. Showing us why Superman won’t kill anyone ever again, after being forced to.
Other smaller complaints, I thought Supergirl’s young partner wasn’t given much to do, nor was Lobo, though he was advertised as half the reason to see the movie. Or maybe a third, with Krypto being the other third, and he gets dispatched pretty early on.
This is one of those movies, though, that suffers by comparison to the last twenty-odd years of superhero flickers. If this had come out around Iron Man, it’d’ve been DC’s best movie ever.
Click the titles to get at muh stories:
or you c’n find alla this right chere:
© MMXXVI
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.