Warner Bros.' "Supergirl" opened to $37 million domestically — well short of the studio's pre-release target of $60 to $70 million — putting the DC Studios title on track for losses that could reach into the hundreds of millions. Rather than reckon with the creative and promotional decisions that drove that shortfall, studio executives and their media partners have redirected blame toward the audience, with The New York Times attributing the underperformance in part to "resurgent misogyny" among its predominantly male fanbase.
The Numbers Tell a Clear Story
The financial damage is substantial. Warner Bros. backed "Supergirl" — the second DC Studios release under creative lead James Gunn — with a $100 million brand tie-in campaign on top of production and marketing costs. DC Studios Co-CEO Peter Safran acknowledged the gap between expectation and result, framing it as one piece of a longer strategic arc: "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." With the summer movie season at peak competition, the film may struggle to reach $100 million at the U.S. box office.
A Promotional Campaign That Worked Against the Film
Star Milly Alcock's press tour became a commercial liability. In back-to-back interviews with Vanity Fair and Variety, Alcock made comments that shifted attention from the film itself — dismissing online critics and singling out "Dad of four, Christian" commenters as a punchline. Then, days before release, she told Queerly Radio the film was "beautiful" because it didn't center on a man, and speculated that her character "probably goes both ways." The remarks energized opposition without expanding the potential audience. Warner Bros. executives later told the Times they were "surprised by both the ferocity of the backlash and its reach" — a reaction that reflects more on internal expectations than on audience behavior.
The Misogyny Framing Doesn't Survive the Data
The Times' framing runs into one inconvenient figure from the film's actual opening weekend: roughly 59% of ticket buyers were men. Female-led superhero films have struggled at the box office in recent years, but that pattern is harder to attribute to male reluctance when men constituted the majority of the audience that did show up. The more direct explanation — mixed-to-poor reviews, an alienating press campaign, and an inexperienced creative team, including a writer whose sole prior credit was a single 2018 short film — has found no takers among those most responsible for the outcome.
What Blame-Shifting Actually Costs
Hollywood's reflex to externalize blame carries a measurable long-term cost: it forecloses the honest postmortems that might produce better films and stronger franchises. Gunn, as head of DC Studios, signed off on the creative direction. The studio signed off on the cast and promotional strategy. Attributing a $37 million opening to audience prejudice rather than product quality does not fix the next film — it makes the next postmortem equally predictable and equally useless.