Superhero movies are supposed to be the sure thing. "Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow" was anything but.
The numbers
The film, directed by Craig Gillespie and starring Milly Alcock as Supergirl, reached theaters on June 26 and opened to roughly $37 million domestically — a weak debut for a big-budget comic-book tentpole carrying a production cost of about $180 million, before the tens of millions more typically spent on marketing. For a superhero release meant to anchor a slate, an opening in that range is a warning sign, not a launch.
What The Hollywood Reporter found
The reasons, according to a Hollywood Reporter investigation, lie in the making of the film. THR reported a fundamental disconnect between Gillespie and DC Studios' leadership, co-chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran, that produced dueling versions of the movie: a director's cut and a studio cut that were tested against each other in the spring. Neither excited audiences. Both, per THR, scored only in the low 60s in testing, with the studio's version edging the director's by a couple of points — a narrow gap that pointed less to one bad cut than to a story that wasn't landing either way.
The friction, THR reported, ran down to small choices. The magazine described roughly nine days of reshoots, the screenwriter Jeremy Slater brought in to rework scenes including the climax, and even a fight over a needle-drop — a Cyndi Lauper cover favored by Gunn ultimately swapped for a Jimmy Eat World track. These behind-the-scenes accounts are THR's reporting; the studio has characterized some of the friction as the ordinary give-and-take of filmmaking.
Why it matters for DC
The stakes reach past one weekend. Gunn and Safran took over DC Studios promising to steady a franchise that had lurched for years, and "Woman of Tomorrow" — adapted from Tom King's acclaimed 2021–22 comic — was positioned as a key title in that reset. A high-profile stumble invites exactly the questions a turnaround is meant to quiet: about oversight, about how competing visions get resolved, and about whether the audience appetite studios are counting on is really there.
Hollywood has learned the same lesson many times: a nine-figure budget guarantees nothing, and creative indecision has a way of showing up on screen. For DC's new leadership, the task now is to keep one disappointment from defining the era they were hired to build.
