There is absolutely zero way to spin the performance of Supergirl over the weekend, the film coming in below even not-great expectations. Supergirl made $38 million in its domestic opening weekend, less than a third of Superman and below all-time horrors like Morbius at $39 million. It has a rarely rotten 56% Rotten Tomatoes critic score, something only three MCU movies ever have had. It also has a B-minus audience rating on Cinemascore, poor for a superhero movie in the context of that metric.
What went wrong here? Why is Supergirl this scale of a disaster on almost every level? A number of reasons:
Picking Supergirl At All – You can make the argument that even if Supergirl was a better movie, it still probably would have underperformed. Having Supergirl go second after Superman in this precarious DCU launch window felt like a mistake at baseline. James Gunn seemed to understand that anchoring the universe with a strong start and a “main” hero, Superman, was important. But then moving directly to his cousin, same powers, same suit, but different attitude as the next blockbuster instead of a larger fixture like Wonder Woman, Batman, The Flash, any other main JLA member, really, was doing Kara a disservice, and she may never have even had a chance with this positioning.
Director Craig Gillespie – If there is one person at the root of why the actual film is bad, not necessarily the decisions to get there, it is director Craig Gillespie, who has never attempted any kind of project like this at all, and it shows. Supergirl often plays like a poor James Gunn impression, full of trashy space bars, needle drops and slow-motion fight scenes spinning around in a circle. But all of it is just…worse than Gunn’s films, like someone tracing a picture with an unsteady hand, and it’s the main thing that wastes Milly Alcock’s performance, which may be the only bright spot of the movie.
Writer Ana Nogueira – Nogueira reportedly impressed James Gunn with her Supergirl script, so much she’s now working on both Wonder Woman and Teen Titans. Her take on Tom King’s Woman of Tomorrow comic story may not be full of terrible dialogue, but its structure, combined with the directing, is certainly something that didn’t work well here. It does not help that in interviews she actively states things about the comic that simply are not true (saying Krem dies in an ambiguous scene, with author Tom King saying it wasn’t supposed to be ambiguous at all that he didn’t die). A fantastic script could have helped save this film, but a passable one didn’t cut it.
Visual Effects – It seems to be a coin flip in 2026 whether your big blockbuster TV show or movie is going to actually spend tens of millions of dollars to look great, or look awful. Last night’s House of the Dragon showed us what a win looks like. Supergirl is a clear loss. It’s a visual mess, both from an art direction perspective (the comic it’s based on is notoriously gorgeous) and a final third of the movie that looks like it was shot on a soundstage, characters hanging out in a bland desert, a place that Mad Max made look gorgeous, but here is muddy and uninteresting. This is not a problem unique to Supergirl these days, but it is a strike against the film here.
James Gunn’s Judgment – The buck still has to stop with Gunn. He’s the one who approved of and raved about the script. He picked Gillespie to direct. He picked Supergirl’s placement in the DCU timeline. He even picked the final needle drop, according to Gillespie, that has turned into a widely mocked meme and makes up probably half the conversation of the film online. This is the first real example of Gunn not being able to put together a good film as a universe architect rather than an actual writer and director, which he is good at. It has raised concerns about the future of the DCU, even if we’re still incredibly early into its run.
It’s not a good situation when your film has a well-cast star as its bright spot, and its only bright spot. If nothing else that surrounds her performance is good, there’s only so much she can do. And the immense amount of pressure of a character like this being just the second leg of a huge universe didn’t help either. Supergirl didn’t work as a film on any level, and its box office is about to reflect that, a historic miss that even DC’s Peter Safran couldn’t wait the weekend to address. Clayface and Lanterns are the next tests later this year, and DC cannot afford a repeat of what happened here.
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