Supergirl did not fly high over the weekend.
The opening weekend box office numbers for DC’s latest film are not great — certainly not more powerful than a locomotive. According to Deadline, the film is estimated to have grossed $38 million in its opening weekend in U.S. theaters.
That’s barely more than half of the reigning box-office champ of the moment, Toy Story 5, which dropped roughly 56 percent from the previous weekend to gross an estimated $70 million from Friday to Sunday.
Supergirl is the second film in the new DC Universe launched last year by studio CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran. Gunn’s Superman movie of 2025 officially began the rebooted comic-book franchise; it earned $125 million in its opening weekend along the way to grossing over $618 million worldwide.
The new Supergirl was spun directly out of Superman. Its star, Milly Alcock, debuted as the title character in a cameo, and the film also co-starred Superman’s breakout hero, Krypto. It was based on an acclaimed Supergirl comic book of recent years, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, but the film got tepid reviews from critics (a “rotten” 56 rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and from audiences (a B- on CinemaScore; Gunn’s Superman earned an A- last year.)
READ MORE: The Best Performances in DC Comics Movies
To put Supergirl’s struggles in perspective: If its final opening weekend total of $38 million holds up, that is less than a million dollars better than Joker: Folie à Deux, the infamous sequel to Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. It got disastrous reviews and proved to be one of the costliest flops in recent movie history. (Joker 2 is reported to have cost more than Supergirl, but not by much; something like $200 million versus $170 million, if online sources are to be trusted.)
The competition in theaters is only going to get tougher for Supergirl in the coming weeks. Minions & Monsters debuts in theaters next Friday and is expected to be a major hit. The week after that, Disney has a live-action remake of Moana that will likely compete with a lot of the same audiences as Supergirl. Then there’s The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brave New World.
DC’s next film is Clayface, a horror film about the Batman villain. It opens in theaters on October 23. The next Superman, Man of Tomorrow, opens next July.
