LOS ANGELES — When James Gunn and Peter Safran took the keys to DC Studios in early 2023, the promise they made to Warner Bros. was not that every film would be a hit. It was that the misses would never be allowed to harden into a narrative. Supergirl is the first real test of that promise, and the way Safran chose to handle the weekend says more about the studio’s plan than the grosses do.
The Craig Gillespie film, led by Milly Alcock, opened to $38 million domestically and $68 million worldwide, beneath the roughly $55 million Warner Bros. had been tracking toward only two weeks earlier. Rather than let the figure sit and curdle, Safran went on the record. He told the New York Times on Sunday that while Supergirl “didn’t meet our box office expectations,” it was “just one component of a broader, long-term strategy at DC Studios that we remain confident in.” That sentence, not the opening weekend, is the actual news.
Executives almost never volunteer the words “didn’t meet expectations” about their own release the same weekend it lands. Safran did it on purpose, getting in front of the framing before it could set into a verdict on the entire enterprise. It is the move of a studio head who watched the previous DC regime die by a thousand think-pieces and intends to starve this one of the same fuel.
The math is neither as grim as a $38 million headline suggests nor as settled as Safran’s calm implies. Against a production budget of about $170 million, lighter than the $225 million spent on Superman, the film still has to clear marketing and the exhibitor split before anyone in Burbank exhales. Warner Bros. has not disclosed what it spent selling the movie, and that undisclosed number is the one that decides whether $68 million worldwide reads as a slow build or a genuine problem.
The release was not starved for screens. Supergirl played in 3,602 North American theaters, a full wide opening, which puts its per-theater average near $10,600 and rules distribution out as an alibi. The seats were there. The urgency was not.
Quality was not the problem either. Alcock drew the warmest reviews of the production, and audiences handed the film a B-minus CinemaScore, a step under the A-minus that greeted Superman a year ago but not a grade that kills a movie on contact. The shortfall was heat, the sense of event that converts a comic-book release into a must-see weekend, and Supergirl never quite generated it.
That is the uncomfortable part for Gunn and Safran. Superman, which drew $618 million worldwide last year, was supposed to be the engine. Supergirl was supposed to prove the engine could pull a second car. Two films into the reboot, the pair hold one genuine hit and one opening the studio itself concedes fell short of where the Hollywood Reporter and rival trackers had it landing, the Hollywood Reporter reported.
The weekend around it offered no cover. Toy Story 5 held with about $70 million in its second frame, a 56 percent slide that still pushed Pixar past $297 million domestically, Deadline reported, and the wider box office is in rude health. The year has crossed $4.7 billion domestically, up roughly 15 percent on 2025, and the summer alone has cleared $2.1 billion. Supergirl underperformed into a strong market, not a dead one, which strips away the easiest excuse.
Safran’s confidence is therefore a wager, not a reassurance. The plan he and Gunn sold in 2023 was built on connection, a slate of films and series engineered to compound rather than reset, and connected universes are least forgiving when an early entry stalls, because every later title inherits the doubt. Holding the line in public costs less than reworking the slate. Whether it is the wiser play depends entirely on what opens next.
What this weekend cannot answer is whether Supergirl is a stumble or a signal. The international rollout is unfinished, the second-weekend hold is unknown, and the next titles on the DC calendar have screened for no one outside the studio. Safran is asking Warner Bros., and the audience, to read a single soft opening as noise inside a much longer signal. The box office has not yet told him whether he is right.
For now the strategy is intact because its architects say it is, which is the privilege of executives who still have the slate ahead of them. The next opening will decide whether the confidence Safran offered this weekend reads as steadiness or as denial.
