Almost a year ago, “Superman” got the reboot of James Gunn and Warner Bros.’ DC Universe off to a good, but not spectacular, start. But with this weekend’s “Supergirl,” the franchise’s momentum could hit a wall thanks to two family-friendly animated giants.
“Supergirl,” directed by Craig Gillespie and starring Milly Alcock as a trauma-stricken Kara Zor-El, was never expected to reach the heights of her cousin’s namesake film, but there are signs that it might fade fast after its opening weekend, squeezed out by the four-quadrant appeal of Disney/Pixar’s “Toy Story 5,” which passed $200 million domestic in less than a week, and Universal’s “Minions & Monsters,” which is looking for another $100 million-plus 5-day Fourth of July opening for Illumination next week.
“Superman” opened to a $125 million domestic launch last year and grossed $354 million domestically and $618 million worldwide. “Supergirl” is tracking for less than half that at around $40-45 million. That’s below the $55 million domestic opening weekend of “The Flash,” one of the last summer DC films released before the reboot, which flopped with just $271 million grossed worldwide in 2023.
While “The Flash” became a cautionary tale of studio overhype, it’s worth remembering that it wasn’t totally savaged by the critics, who gave it a 63% Rotten Tomatoes score. But the good-but-not-great buzz was not enough to get casual moviegoers off the fence, as the film plummeted 72.5% in its second weekend behind better received animated films like “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” and “Elemental.”
As early reviews are coming in, “Supergirl” is getting similar mixed reception from critics, holding a 57% Rotten Tomatoes score at time of writing. That’s a bad omen considering that the big geek culture misfires of the summer so far like “Masters of the Universe” and “The Mandalorian and Grogu” got RT scores in the 60s from critics and 80s from audiences, but failed to expand their draw beyond their core fan bases.
But “Toy Story 5” is expanding fast, becoming a four-quadrant black hole that is pulling in the vast majority of audiences between the ages of 5 and 55 and is looking at a second weekend total north of $80 million. The “Despicable Me”/”Minions” franchise, now on its seventh film, shows no signs of losing its family appeal when it debuts next week. That means that “Supergirl” needs to have excellent audience reception — probably as good as “Superman” — to have a chance of drawing casual audiences against such strong competition.
That doesn’t mean “Supergirl” needs to perform as well as “Superman” to be a success for Warner Bros. Insiders at the studio say that anything above $300 million worldwide will be seen as a win, and there is hope that the presence of Matthias Schoenarts, an actor with some overseas appeal, will help boost the film’s international potential. But if it follows the same quick exit as “The Flash,” it may raise some questions about how much interest there is among non-hardcore fans for a DC Universe stretched across multiple tentpole movies.
That question looms even larger given that the next three films DC has slated are the $40 million-budgeted horror film “Clayface,” the “Superman” sequel “Man of Tomorrow,” and Matt Reeves’ “The Batman — Part II,” a direct sequel to his 2022 film that will keep Robert Pattinson’s Batman completely detached from Gunn’s universe. Gunn and Safran have said that the DC Universe will not be as closely interlinked between films as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, preventing the need to watch all of the films to keep up.
But it will take consistency to build up the film-to-film interest that general audiences had for the MCU in the 2010s, and which will support multiple films with budgets similar to the reported $175 million that “Supergirl” had, even if, as insiders told TheWrap, it is devoid of the backend deals that raise the break-even point for other tentpoles like “Superman.”
Elsewhere, Paramount will release “Jackass: Best and Last,” the fifth and final film in the slapstick stunt series that began as a hit MTV show in 2000 and evolved into a raunchy but playful big screen spectacular.
After nearly a decade in dormancy, the majority of the original cast, led by Johnny Knoxville, reunited for the 2022 film “Jackass Forever,” a film with the distinction of being one of the first movies to resume filming on the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the box office still in its recovery phase, “Forever” became a modest hit in a year that was full of success for Paramount, grossing $80.5 million worldwide against a $10 million budget.
Facing a far more competitive market than “Forever,” “Jackass: Best and Last” might end up making less as trackers are projecting a $10-14 million opening for the film, with Paramount’s projections on the low end of that range. “Forever” opened to $23.1 million from an early February release slot.
But with the same $10 million production spend, it’s fine for Paramount if “Best and Last” only draws out nostalgic millennial and Gen Xers who have been watching “Jackass” since Knoxville was knocked out by Butterbean in a department store. With the original cast now in their late 50s, the film serves as a retrospective for the entire history of “Jackass,” mixing new stunts with compilations of past ones from the previous films.
In addition to theatrical grosses, Paramount is hoping that the new film will also bring some streaming revenue as the studio has released the entire “Jackass” library, including the spinoff film “Bad Grandpa” and all 24 episodes of the original MTV series, on Paramount+.