The story of Supergirl at the box office has gone from bad to worse, as the movie has suffered one of the worst second-weekend drops ever for a comic book movie in the US. It has crawled over the $100 million threshold, but with a reported budget of $170 to $180 million, it's unlikely the film is going to be in the green from its cinema earnings alone.
We've already heard that the Supergirl box office figure isn't that concerning to the head honchos at the DCU. It seems as if creative differences were what led to the film not shaping up to its fullest potential. According to The Hollywood Reporter, director Craig Gillespie and DCU heads James Gunn and Peter Safran had multiple conversations about the different directions they saw for Supergirl. Gunn even suggested a different needle drop for the film, which could have dodged the heavily criticised Jimmy Eat World cover that ended up in the final product.
Apparently, the differences became so great that the studio ended up coming up with a different cut compared to Gillespie, which ended up winning out by a hair with test audiences. The scores from test screenings for the movie were apparently comparable to the scores seen by the shelved Batgirl movie and Shazam: Fury of the Gods. With a US debut that managed to perform worse than the Joker sequel, the new DCU has already had its first blunder at the box office. Still, it's not like the MCU didn't deliver any stinkers in its first few years, and we'll just have to see how it all turns out with Gunn still steering the ship.