Supergirl flopped hard at the box office, but is the film actually the disaster the numbers suggest?

[GoldbergFan]

The Supergirl reviews and receipts are worth untangling because they tell two different stories. Commercially it was brutal, a roughly 38 million dollar domestic opening, less than a third of Superman, a rotten Rotten Tomatoes critic score around 56 percent and a B minus CinemaScore, which for a superhero tentpole is a genuine miss and has already raised questions about the direction of the new DC Universe

And yet a strand of the coverage, including a contrarian review doing the rounds, argues the movie itself is not the catastrophe the box office implies. The near universal bright spot is Milly Alcock as Kara, whose swagger and screen presence critics rate even when they savage everything around her, and the emotional flashback material and the Krypto subplot get repeatedly singled out as working

The consensus on what actually went wrong is more about surrounding choices than the lead. The Woman of Tomorrow comic source is strong, but the script and structure are called generic, the tone strains too hard for a punk rock attitude, and slotting Supergirl second in a fragile DC Universe launch window put enormous pressure on a standalone film that maybe could not have overperformed regardless of quality

It leaves you with the familiar modern problem of a well cast lead stranded in a product that surrounds her with mediocrity, where there is only so much one performance can carry. Alcock keeps getting the actress you look forward to seeing in something better treatment, which is its own kind of faint praise and its own kind of waste

So the film board gets the questions. Is a movie with a great lead and a weak everything else worth your time or a rental at best, does slotting a character second in a shaky cinematic universe doom them before a frame is shot, and is the gap between a 56 percent critic score and a historic box office bomb evidence that the flop was about franchise fatigue more than this particular film?

Review: Supergirl is not the disaster its low box office suggestsarstechnica.com

[VoidRanger24]

The great lead stranded in mediocrity thing is the defining superhero movie failure of the decade and Supergirl is just the latest, you can feel the good film trapped inside the committee product

[Owen73]

56 percent critics and a 38 million opening do not match and that gap IS the story, this was franchise fatigue and a bad release slot punishing a film that is merely okay, not a genuine catastrophe on screen

[Maisie84]

Disagree that the gap proves fatigue, a B minus CinemaScore means the actual paying audiences did not love it either, that is not just critics or fatigue, the word of mouth was the killer

[RedKnight]

Alcock deserves so much better and everyone can see it, casting the lead perfectly and then failing her with the script is almost more frustrating than a straightforward bad movie

[Gerrard]

Going second in a shaky universe absolutely doomed it, nobody had bought into this DC world enough yet to turn out for the follow up, the slot was the mistake before a single creative choice

[NeuralTrace26]

The punk rock thing being cringe is a fair hit, the moment a big studio movie insists it is punk rock it has already lost the argument, that is corporate pretension not attitude

[RightAbout24]

Worth a rental for Alcock and Krypto and nothing else, which is a fine outcome, not every comic book movie needs to be event viewing, some are just a decent Sunday afternoon

[Sam92]

The source comic is genuinely great which makes the generic script worse, they had Woman of Tomorrow right there and flattened it into a save the dog road trip, that is the real waste

[VidiTechnica]

Historic bomb is a bit dramatic when the film is a functional 56 percent, the disaster is financial and strategic for DC, not artistic, and conflating those two is how good performances get buried

[LegendaryOliver16]

The lead being the only bright spot is exactly why the box office stings, when there is nothing around the star to support her, no amount of charisma sells tickets in week two