Supergirl freefalls at the box office, on track for a $100 million wipeout
Supergirl is falling fast at the global box office, leaving Warner Bros. staring at a projected loss north of $100 million. Meant to build on last year’s Superman surge, the DC adventure is suffering rapid audience erosion.
If you thought Warner Bros. were on a hot streak after Superman smashed it last year, their follow-up with Supergirl should be a shock to the system – and not in a good way. The studio is now staring down the barrel of a theatrical loss north of $100 million, which isn’t exactly what the DC brass had written on the whiteboard when this one was greenlit.
Nosedive at the Box Office
The numbers are ugly, whichever way you slice them. After a half-decent start – Supergirl launched on 26 June in 3,602 cinemas and took home $37.1 million across its opening weekend, raking in just over $10k per screen – any hope dried up fast. The second weekend saw an eye-watering 76.8% drop, slumping to $8.6 million without losing a single screen nationally. That’s the kind of cliff drop that makes accountants chew through their pens.
And it only gets worse from there. Third weekend? Another 58.6% off the top, down to a feeble $3.56 million between 10 and 12 July. Per cinema, it only managed $1,377 – not even enough to cover a superhero’s dry cleaning bill.
- Opening weekend (26-28 June): $37.1 million (3,602 cinemas, $10,300 per screen average)
- Second weekend: $8.6 million (76.8% drop, same screen count)
- Third weekend: $3.56 million (down 58.6%, after being dropped by over 1,000 cinemas to 2,584)
- Friday 11 July: $1.1 million (facing a brutal 69.4% drop from previous Friday’s $3.6 million)
If you want to know how cinemas felt about its staying power, look at how they reacted ahead of its third Friday: more than 1,000 cinemas gave Supergirl the boot all at once. By now, it’s not even clinging onto the lower end of the domestic top five. The third Friday’s performance was so dire, Cosmic Book pointed out, only Joker: Folie à Deux managed a worse third Friday among DC’s recent theatrical-only releases. Not the sort of competition you want to be winning.
Crunching the Losses
Right now, it’s scraped together $66 million domestically and $49.4 million from international punters. That brings us to a running global total of $115.4 million. Here’s the problem: Warner and DC supposedly dropped $170 million on making the film, and lobbed in another $120 million for marketing. That’s $290 million all in, if you’re keeping count.
Even with heroic optimism, forecasts say Supergirl will limp to a domestic finish of $100 million and a global total in the $200–210 million range. Whichever way you fudge it, that’s a minimum loss of $100–120 million before you’ve even started talking about premiums or streaming salvage.
From Promise to Panic
The real sting for Warner Bros. is that Supergirl was supposed to capitalise on the momentum from Superman’s big return last year. Instead, audiences just marched straight for the exits. The studio, frankly, must be wondering what on earth went wrong. With losses piling up like this, future DC projects will probably see a lot more number-crunching and a lot less swagger in the pitch meetings.
One industry insider summed it up in what feels like the understatement of the year:
'Optimism vanished within days.'
Source: Devanshi Basu, SuperHeroHype