DC is no stranger to box office flops, but Supergirl was supposed to be different. The film is only the second theatrical release from DC Studios, the rebooted operation that co-CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran oversee at Warner Bros. The film also spun directly out of last summer’s Superman, which opened to $125 million domestically and finished with more than $615 million worldwide. House of the Dragon breakout Milly Alcock stars as Kara Zor-El in an adaptation of the acclaimed Woman of Tomorrow comic, with Cruella director Craig Gillespie behind the camera. This film had all the stars aligned to be a hit.
Instead, Supergirl became DC’s sixth major box office flop since early 2023. The movie opened to just $37.1 million domestically on June 26, then collapsed 77% in its second weekend. A month into release, its worldwide total is stuck near $124 million against a reported $170 million production budget and a marketing spend of around $120 million, leaving Warner Bros. bracing to lose at least $100 million.
The studio wasted little time cutting its losses. Supergirl fell out of the domestic top five after two weeks and shed more than 1,000 theaters heading into its third. The film arrives on digital storefronts on Tuesday, July 28, barely a month after its theatrical premiere.
Reviews offered no rescue, either. Supergirl holds a 53% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes and a B- CinemaScore from opening night audiences, a clear step down from the A- that greeted Superman a year earlier.
One expensive misfire can be written off as bad luck. A pattern this long cannot. Supergirl now joins a line of costly DC disappointments stretching back to the dying days of the DCEU, and each disaster makes one wonder if DC can actually build a profitable cinematic universe.
Every Major DC Box Office Flop Since 2023
Shazam! Fury of the Gods
The streak started in March 2023 with Shazam! Fury of the Gods, the follow-up to a well-liked 2019 original that earned $140 million domestically and $366 million worldwide on a modest $100 million budget. Zachary Levi returned as the boyish hero, with Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu joining as the villainous Daughters of Atlas, yet audiences shrugged. The sequel opened to $30.1 million domestically and $65.5 million globally, including a dismal $4.4 million start in China.
By the end of its run, Fury of the Gods managed only $57.6 million domestically and about $134 million worldwide on a reported budget between $110 million and $125 million, with roughly $100 million more going to marketing. Painful as those numbers were, the sequel at least kept its spending in check. Supergirl is projected to close its run around $130 million worldwide, a similar result that cost Warner Bros. a lot more to produce.
The Flash
Three months later, The Flash delivered the costliest failure of the bunch. Warner Bros. needed nearly a decade to get the Ezra Miller vehicle into theaters, and the finished film leaned hard on nostalgia by bringing back Michael Keaton’s Batman for the first time since 1992. Even that wasn’t enough to salvage this disaster. The multiverse adventure opened to $55 million domestically, far below what a movie of its scale required.
The Flash topped out at $108 million domestically and roughly $270 million worldwide against a reported $200 million budget before marketing, and analysts pegged the studio’s losses at $200 million or more, among the largest ever recorded for a superhero film. Oddly, that makes it the inverse of Supergirl. The Scarlet Speedster’s movie grossed more than double what the Girl of Steel will finish with and still lost far more money.
Blue Beetle
Blue Beetle deserved better than what August 2023 gave it. The Xolo Maridueña-led origin story drew solid reviews and made history as the first live-action superhero film with a Latino lead, but it reached theaters while the writers’ and actors’ strikes kept its cast away from the promotional trail. The film opened to a quiet $25.4 million, enough to dethrone Barbie after a month at No. 1 and little else.
Ángel Manuel Soto’s film finished with $72.5 million domestically and $130.8 million worldwide, the lowest total in DCEU history, though its comparatively lean $104 million budget softened the blow. The whole point of rebooting the franchise was to cure the audience apathy that doomed movies like this one. Three years on, Supergirl is heading toward nearly the same worldwide number, which suggests the new universe inherited the old one’s biggest problem.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom closed out the DCEU in December 2023 while carrying impossible expectations. Jason Momoa’s first solo outing swam past $1.1 billion worldwide in 2018 and remains the highest-grossing DC film ever, and director James Wan returned for the sequel, but moviegoers didn’t. The follow-up opened to about $27 million domestically over the Christmas holiday and never found the crossover audience its predecessor enjoyed.
Strong international business eventually pushed the sequel to $124 million domestically and $434 million worldwide, easily the biggest gross of the six films covered here. Against a reported $205 million budget, though, that total barely cleared the film’s break-even point, and a blockbuster scraping into the black stood as the closest thing DC had to good news during this period. Supergirl won’t come anywhere close, with a projected finish below a third of the Atlantis sequel’s haul.
Joker: Folie à Deux
The strangest failure of the group arrived in October 2024. Joker: Folie à Deux followed a 2019 original that crossed $1 billion worldwide on a budget around a third the size of its sequel’s and won Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar. Director Todd Phillips answered that success with a $200 million courtroom musical co-starring Lady Gaga, and audiences rejected this direction almost immediately, handing the film a rare D CinemaScore.
The sequel cratered after opening weekend, finishing under $60 million domestically and $206.4 million worldwide, and later reports placed Warner Bros.’ net loss at roughly $144 million. Joker: Folie à Deux launched with $37.7 million, and Supergirl launched with $37.1 million, two nearly identical starts separated by almost two years and a full franchise reboot. The new DC Universe was supposed to end this pattern, and its next chance to prove that it can arrives on October 23, when the body horror experiment Clayface reaches theaters.
Geraldo Amartey is a writer at The Direct. He joined the team in 2025, bringing with him four years of experience covering entertainment news, pop culture, and fan-favorite franchises for sites like YEN, Briefly and Tuko.
