Hollywood’s latest lesson in “get woke, go broke” just hit theaters—and the box office numbers are brutal. Warner Bros.’ Supergirl has officially become the worst-earning DC movie released in more than two decades, limping to just $108 million globally as of this past weekend. The last DC film that performed this poorly was the infamous 2004 bomb Catwoman, which took in $82 million. Adjusted for inflation, that 2004 flop would clear roughly $149 million today—still crushing Supergirl’s haul, according to Forbes.
To even match DC’s other recent dud Blue Beetle (which scraped $130 million in 2023), Supergirl needs another $22 million it almost certainly won’t find. The studio sank around $170 million in net production costs alone. Factor in advertising and marketing, and the total tab approaches $300 million. With barely over $100 million in ticket sales, Warner Bros. and DC are staring down massive losses.
The timing of this disaster is no coincidence. Lead actress Milly Alcock, who plays Kara Zor-El, spent the run-up to release lecturing audiences with the kind of progressive talking points that have tanked franchise after franchise. She told the Associated Press the film is “beautiful” precisely because it is “not centered around a man.” During Pride Month she floated the idea that her character “could go both ways,” calling Kara “a really great representation of what a modern woman can be.”
When inevitable backlash followed, Alcock didn’t walk it back—she doubled down with pure contempt. She dismissed her critics as mostly “Christian dads,” sneering that the loudest opposition came from “burner accounts” or people whose profiles read “Dad of four, Christian.” Her response? “Whose opinion do you really care about? If you’re p*ssing the right kind of people off, you’re doing OK.”
That’s the modern Hollywood formula in a nutshell: alienate the core audience that actually buys tickets, lecture them about representation and sexuality, then act shocked when the theater seats stay empty. Superhero movies used to be escapist entertainment that united people. Now they’re vehicles for ideology that lecture half the country while lecturing the other half that their values are a punchline.
Supergirl didn’t just underperform. It underperformed so badly it made Catwoman—a film widely mocked as one of the worst comic-book adaptations ever—look like a relative success. The numbers don’t lie. When studios prioritize “not centered around a man” over making a movie people want to watch, the result is predictable: red ink, empty seats, and another entry in the growing catalog of woke box-office disasters.
Get woke. Go broke. DC just proved it again.
