Box Office Report for the Week of June 28

Do we live in a new era of entertainment, or are audiences simply rejecting Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl? After all, James Gunn’s DCU, even though still in its infancy, is making the same mistakes the previous regime did – and currently Marvel – in promising to offer newer, more original superhero stories to the fold and doing things we’ve already seen before.

The result? A bigger bomb than Morbius and The Marvels, and a movie that couldn’t even open at the top spot. Granted, releasing a week after Toy Story 5 and a week before the potential juggernaut of Minions & Monsters was a shortsighted decision, but there’s no denying the landscape has dramatically changed, and audiences won’t simply go to the theater anymore to see the “latest superhero movie.”

While I saw Supergirl in a packed theatre during the national holiday in my neck of the woods, the crowd’s reaction was vastly different from that of Superman just last year, when people seemed invested in what was on screen. For Supergirl, it was dead silence the entire time. The only occasions on which the audiences began to intuitively react were during the Dune: Part Three and Digger trailers. 

The result? A dismal $38 million domestic opening and a global tally of $68 million. Ouch. This is also not great for James Gunn, who has been touting Ana Nogueira’s screenplay as different than what had come before, and for Safran, who said that superhero fatigue was “never a thing” and that “You gotta try something new. You have to change the game a little bit. The essential story on which Supergirl is based is something cool and original, and we haven’t seen before.”

There are many instances of DC’s co-heads talking about how great the film is, but the critical (and commercial) reception says otherwise. Hopefully, they will be able to bounce back with the upcoming Lanterns on HBO and Clayface in cinemas, but so far, the slate of titles has been more mixed than consistently great. 

The other new release this weekend was Jeff Tremaine’s Jackass: Best and Last, and while it didn’t perform as high as 2022’s Jackass Forever, which was released during the cusp of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is still a modest success. The film cost only $10 million to make, considering that most of it is either archival footage from previous Jackass films or never-before-seen images that never made MTV, interspersed with newer stunts, and its $8.4 million opening is more than respectable in that regard. 

In fact, there’s a chance Jackass: Best and Last becomes more profitable for Paramount than Supergirl will for Warner Bros, and if the merger ends up being successful, what will happen to the DC brand after being revitalized, but failing to generate any audience interest? Time will tell, but the news isn’t looking too good for James Gunn and Peter Safran…until they turn that ship around – and fast!

Here is the full list of the top ten films of the weekend:

1. Toy Story 5 (Disney): $70.0M (-56%) – 4,425 theatres
2. Supergirl (Warner Bros): $38.0M – 3,602 theatres
3. Obsession (Universal): $9.8M (-27%) – 2,965 theatres
4. Jackass: Best and Last (Paramount): $8.4M – 2,855 theatres
5. Disclosure Day (Universal): $8.1M (-54%) – 3,357 theatres
6. Backrooms (A24): $4.3M (-40%) – 2,396 theatres
7. Scary Movie (Paramount): $3.0M (-53%) – 2,004 theatres
8. Masters of the Universe (Amazon MGM Studios): $2.2M (-64%) – 2,090 theatres
9. Bleach: The Thousand Year Blood War – The Calamity (Fathom Entertainment): $1.9M – 943 theatres
10. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (Disney): $1.6M (-62%) – 1,250 theatres

Source: Comscore