Not too long ago, you could put a cape on a character that not many people knew, like a talking raccoon or an ant that could travel through time, and people would come to see it. It wasn’t because they knew the person, but because they believed the machine. They thought that the next piece would be important, would connect to something bigger, and would pay off in a huge, thunderous way in the end. It looks like that era may be quietly coming to an end.
Last weekend, Milly Alcock’s Supergirl only made $38 million in North America and about $68 million around the world. That’s not just disappointing numbers for a movie that reportedly cost about $170 million to make before marketing. It’s a slow-motion disaster. James Gunn’s new DC Universe has only two movies in, but there’s already a wound that needs to be fixed.
It’s simple to say that the movie is to blame. Supergirl, who got her idea from the comic book Woman of Tomorrow, takes Kara Zor-El on a journey across the galaxy to get revenge. The trip has a darker tone than most people expected. Milly Alcock really shines in the part; she’s sparkly, complicated, and rougher around the edges than her cousin Superman. That’s what the movie does. It looks like real choices aren’t enough right now, though.
Craft isn’t the real problem. It’s building design. Marvel taught people for more than ten years that each movie was a stepping stone and that even small characters could move up in the company. The machine hums when that promise comes true. When it doesn’t—like when Eternals or Madame Web fails, or now when Supergirl hits the ground hard—the whole system breaks down. People have probably started to quietly ask themselves, “Does this really lead anywhere I care about?”
Being able to watch this happen is almost poetic. The superhero culture didn’t just appear out of nowhere. It took about fifteen years of careful planning and work to make it happen. In 2008, Iron Man wasn’t just a good movie; it was a hug for the people who saw it. A promise. And for years, both Marvel and DC kept keeping that promise by putting out movies with stories that were like Lego structures that got more complicated over time. Characters took ideas from each other. The plots of different movies mixed. More than any single story, the connected universe became the product.
But universes that are linked need trust. The edges of trust are hard to fix once they start to fray. Sony’s Spider-Man cousins, Morbius, Kraven, and Madame Web, seemed to push people’s patience to the limit. DC has already blown up its old world and begun anew. The new version is stumbling around before it gets going. It’s still not clear if Gunn’s upcoming Superman sequel, even if it does well, can completely change this trend.
The real-world effects are already starting to show up. DC will probably focus more on Batman and Superman, since those are names that everyone knows. A movie based on Batman: The Brave and the Bold is being made. A week ago, projects like a Swamp Thing movie or Teen Titans seemed much more certain. Today, they don’t seem as sure. As Warner Bros. watches a possible $100 million loss happen, it will have its own ideas about how experimental Gunn can be.
Marvel has the same problem, but it’s a little less obvious and maybe more troubling. If people don’t watch solo movies with actors below the level of Thor and Iron Man, the big team-up movies lose their emotional support. People need to care about characters like Shang-Chi and the Scarlet Witch separately before they appear on screen together in Secret Wars, which is said to be one of Marvel’s biggest crossovers ever. You have to earn that care, one movie at a time. And it’s getting harder to earn.
Take a moment to think about what made this time period exciting in the first place. There was something really fun about seeing Spider-Man and Iron Man trade one-liners and seeing Thor appear in a movie about aliens. It was like the comics were finally real. That happiness is still possible. It can’t be made through obligation, though. People aren’t going to the theaters to see a franchise movie because they have to. They go when they think something will surprise them.
Supergirl’s fall won’t end superhero movies. But it might put an end to the idea that the genre works as a single, self-reinforcing system where each entry makes the others better. It was always a little risky to make that assumption. It’s beginning to look old.