DC Studios’ Peter Safran Breaks Silence on ‘Supergirl’ Box Office Miss: “Not Meeting Our Box Office Expectations”

Quite interesting how DC Studios film chief Peter Safran decided to give a statement to The New York Times about “Supergirl” underperforming with a $38M debut weekend.

Here’s Safran, in damage control, telling NYT that “Supergirl” is just part of the DCU’s “broader content strategy.”

While ‘Supergirl’ didn’t meet our box office expectations, it’s just one component of a broader, long-term strategy at DC Studios that we remain confident in

Obviously, there will be spin—there has to be spin—but there’s some truth to what Safran is saying. This is only the second DCU movie, and to say this was a failed experiment on the part of Safran and James Gunn is jumping the gun. They have “Clayface” coming in October, and that film only cost $45M to produce.

That said, I’m puzzled by the decision to make “Supergirl,” as only the second film in this new DCU, on a $186M budget, with a filmmaker—Craig Gillespie—who had never proven himself in the superhero genre, and a rookie writer, Ana Nogueira, who had never written a feature film before. It’s just puzzling.

The New York Times tried to fault what it describes as “an uncomfortable truth,” claiming that “female-led superhero movies have been rejected” almost uniformly over the past five years or so, “perhaps reflecting misogyny among the core fan base, which is largely male.”

It cites “The Marvels” and “Madame Web” as evidence of this “misogyny,” which is absolutely hilarious considering that, much like “Supergirl,” those were mediocre movies. If we’ve learned anything this decade, it’s that word of mouth spreads faster than ever before and can greatly affect a film’s box office performance.

So, no, it wasn’t misogyny that sank “Supergirl,” but rather its quality, the lukewarm trailers, and the comic book genre’s oversaturation among the general moviegoing public. Unless you’re Spider-Man, Batman, or the Avengers, a box office hit is no longer guaranteed. You need to make a good movie, and, bewilderingly, Gunn and Safran believed they had one with “Supergirl.”