Robert Hamer
So Supergirl performed abysmally at the box office last weekend, and it’s unlikely that it’ll recover or grow box office “legs” heading into this weekend. It’s on track to lose at least $100 million for DC Studios, and we’re just on our second film in this rebooted cinematic universe trying to compete with the Marvel juggernaut. There are a number of reasons for this; competition from sequels to two of the most popular animated film franchises ever being the dominant factor, mixed reception from both audiences and critics are another. Joey’s take was positive but not effusively so, which probably didn’t motivate a ton of our readers to go out and watch it.
Personally, I despised the film. Mostly, but not exclusively, because the hypocrisy of its denouement brazenly insulted my intelligence and everyone else’s. But plenty of hit movies have similarly treated their audiences like cattle. I would like to believe its poor quality is the reason why general moviegoers have rejected Supergirl, but in my heart, I know that’s not true. I also know that most people, contra the whining from a multimedia outlet currently hemorrhaging money in their attempt to produce reactionary-coded knock-offs of better shows, aren’t averse to feminist messaging in their pop entertainment. It’s also not true that general audiences are getting burned out on franchises; I know we’re all celebrating the success of original movies like Obsession and Backrooms this year, but we can’t forget that the two billion-dollar champs so far in 2026 have been The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (based on one of the most popular video game franchises of all time) and Michael (trading on one of the most recognizable names in the history of the American music industry). The fourth sequel to a 31-year-old movie is well on its way to joining The Billion Dollar Club soon. I’m sad to concede that my prediction of the industry pulling the “Death” card on their franchise-addicted status quo did not come true.
So why did Supergirl perform so poorly? I think we need to put forward an answer that is going to be very hard for Hollywood studio executives to even consider, let alone accept: women, by and large, just aren’t into superhero movies, at least not ones centering women. No, angry commenter furiously typing as you read this, I am not saying all women are disinterested in superheroine movies. If you are a woman and you regularly pay money to see them, I’m not trying to invalidate your individual consumer preferences. I’m talking about a general trend among female-led superhero movies. Because the macro-level pattern is undeniable. Consider:
- The least-financially successful movie Marvel Studios has produced so far is The Marvels, featuring a trio of superheroines in a film directed and written exclusively by women. It lost $237 million for Disney, making it the single biggest box office bomb of 2023 (the same year Barbie became a monster hit!).
- Black Widow barely managed to eke out a small profit, and still ended up being one of the lowest-grossing movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe despite headlining one of the franchise’s biggest movie stars.
- None of the Sony Spider-Man spin-offs (sans the Venom trilogy) were particularly successful, but the critical and commercial failure of Madame Web was especially stark.
- Looking to their competitors over at DC, Wonder Woman 1984 put up a nine-figure loss for Warner Bros. Pictures, and though they tried to spin it as a “loss leader” due to their alleged streaming numbers being boosted by the movie, there’s no way to independently verify that claim and, tellingly, it never got a sequel.
- “Oh come on, Robert! That’s not a fair example! COVID-19 was still raging back then!” Okay, let’s look at Birds of Prey (and the Long-Winded Subtitle Announcing This Was Really A Harley Quinn Movie), which hit theaters before the pandemic. It was also a box office dud that lost about $50 million for its studio despite enjoying some of the best reviews of any installment of the now-abandoned DCEU.
- Things don’t get much better when you go back before the era of “cinematic universes,” either – Elektra and Catwoman also bombed in theaters (though the latter film actually makes quite a bit of money for its stakeholders to this day for reasons too complicated to explain in this op-ed). Heck, they already tried a Supergirl movie in the 1980s that was also a flop!
This isn’t just because men were staying away from them, either. Women, for the most part, also weren’t interested in paying to see these films. The sole exception to this trend was 2017’s Wonder Woman, which I would argue hit the zeitgeist at the exact right time. It benefitted both from being the first solo feature film centering the most iconic superheroine in western fiction and also serving as a cultural pick-me-up, being released mere months after the 2016 election demoralized women across the country. Other than that, comic book superheroines aren’t reliable box office draws. Action heroines certainly are; just look at The Hunger Games. Women-led franchises packed with silly interconnected lore definitely are; the Twilight series conclusively proves that. Cynical corporate brand reinforcements, unfortunately, are; The Little Mermaid remake made bank.
But the moment you put an actress in a superhero outfit and make them the centerpiece of your blockbuster action spectacle, most women lose interest. Disney and Warner Bros. Pictures don’t want to accept this, because women are a massive consumer demographic they’d love to tap into and they want to believe the comic book superhero money-printing formula will reliably work on them the same way it does for men. But it just doesn’t. I’m not a gender studies scholar, so I can’t confidently speculate on why that is, but maybe it has to do with superheroes offering a vicarious fantasy to men that women don’t share? The prime movie ticket-buying audience – besides exhausted parents just hoping their kids will just sit still for a family movie for two hours, of course – are adults in their twenties with disposable income, and while men in their twenties develop feelings of invulnerability at that age (me being one of them back then!), women in their twenties really start to grapple with how vulnerable they are out in the adult world, and so watching a woman in a movie fly around and shooting lasers out of her eyes feels incongruous to them. Or perhaps, because so many of the early comic book superheroines were created as distaff counterparts to established male heroes, putting characters like Kara Zor-El and Carol Danvers front-and-center feels condescending to women in a way that YA fiction adaptations, being built around their female protagonists from the jump, do not?
Either way, the consequences are the same. Movie studios can and should produce major tentpole theatrical features appealing to women. But they can no longer assume superheroines are the means to do that. The Housemaid grossed four times what Madame Web pulled in at the box office despite having a third of the production budget – that’s a clear signal to studio executives trying to figure out how to convince women to hand them their money.
Or, at the very least, they need to stop making these comic book superheroine movies so goddamned expensive for no reason…
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