Warner Bros’ new big-budget superhero feature film Supergirl grossed just $62.6 million at the global box office in its opening weekend. Given that it had a production budget of about $186 million, breaking even, let alone turning a profit for the studio, is off the table for the picture already.
Prior to its release, Supergirl got a soft version of the ‘Rachel Zegler’s Snow White treatment’ of the internet. Right-leaning content creators put out extensive, mostly negative coverage of the film and its upcoming release.
What got their attention initially was when the actress playing the titular character, Milly Alcock, gave an interview to Variety magazine, in which she claimed that the fact that some of the people criticizing her online are ‘Dad of four, Christian’ is ‘hilarious’ to her, and added that ‘If you’re pissing the right kind of people off, you’re doing OK’ on the matter.
Later, Alcock—an ironic last name for someone portraying a powerful female hero—told reporters at a red carpet appearance that she is happy that Supergirl has become a ‘queer icon’ and the fact that the character ‘doesn’t live inside the binary of what we think a woman should be’ is what makes her ‘so special and so exciting’.
Well, it certainly did not make her so special and exciting to draw a large enough audience in theatres to make a profit for the studio.
In fact, Supergirl is set to lose Warner Bros around $100 million on the low end of the estimate. Its estimated break-even point is at around $400 million in generated revenue, given that movie theatres keep about half of the ticket sales and the $186 million production budget does not include marketing costs.
Supergirl is the latest ‘movie casualty’ of the online anti-woke cultural commentary community. Their track record is not flawless—movies like the 2025 edition of Superman by Warner Bros or the 2023 version of The Little Mermaid by Disney were able to turn a profit despite criticism online.
However, films such as the all-female Ghostbusters edition all the way back in 2016, or, more recently, the aforementioned 2025 version of Snow White starring Rachel Zegler, crashed and burned at the box office after being ‘called out’ on the internet.
Which should make the people behind an upcoming movie, already in the crosshairs of internet critics due to its odd casting choices, nervous.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Faces Similar Online Backlash to Supergirl
The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan, is set to be released on 17 July, less than three weeks from now.
Its production budget is even heftier than that of Supergirl, with Universal Pictures spending a quarter of a billion dollars on making the movie. Thus, this film has even more pressure to make a splash at the box office—yet controversies around it are already brewing.
The most contentious one among them is all is the casting of Helen of Troy. Despite being explicitly described as white in the source material by Homer nearly 3,000 years ago, and being a symbol of traditional European beauty standards, Helen is being played by Mexican Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o in the movie—who, by the way, talked about the importance of the authentic portrayal of African culture when she appeared in the 2018 film Black Panther…
There had already been a popular frustration with ahistorical so-called ‘race swapping’ castings in modern films when news of Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy broke. That frustration, by the way, extends to audiences of colour as well, as discovered by a survey conducted by the BBC in January this year.
Transgender actor Elliot Page was rumoured to be playing the legendary Greek warrior Achilles in the upcoming adaptation of the Odyssey, adding to the slew of casting choices puzzling potential audiences. However, it was later clarified that Page will appear in the role of Sinon.
If The Odyssey ends up with the same fate as Supergirl in terms of financial performance, which is getting increasingly likely at this point, it will be just another in the long list of cases that should caution filmmakers against pandering to progressive sensitivities in big-budget productions. Progressivism may not be as popular as they like to think it is.
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