Supergirl opened with $38 million in U.S. and Canadian theaters and still got outpaced by Toy Story 5, which stayed No. 1 with $70 million domestic and another $89.1 million overseas. For Warner Bros. DC’s new era, that gap is the story: a big-budget superhero spinoff still failed to lift off even after near-record energy for animation next door.

Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl, part of DC Studios’ rollout led by James Gunn and Peter Safran (tapped to lead DC Studios in late 2022), is also reportedly one of those movies where the final product had to be reshaped after test screenings. The results matched the damage: Supergirl scored 56% “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes and earned a “B-” CinemaScore from audiences, a combination that typically signals not just lukewarm marketing, but weak word-of-mouth at the gate and beyond. Meanwhile, Toy Story 5 has been steamrolling in two weeks with $585 million globally.

Zoom out and the opening weekend numbers start to look less like a fluke and more like a pattern executives need to worry about. The Fortune piece frames it as a setback for Warner Bros. Discovery’s revamped DC movie operations, and it also compares Supergirl’s debut to other DC misses. The opening puts Supergirl behind The Flash, which debuted with $55 million in 2023, and The Green Lantern, which opened with $53 million in 2011. Supergirl lands only barely ahead of Joker: Folie à Deux, which debuted with $37.7 million in 2024. That comparative lineup matters for leadership teams because it suggests the problem is not “one movie underperformed.” It’s “a franchise strategy is struggling to reliably convert brand into opening-week demand.”

There’s also the market context the article calls out, and it is blunt: superhero movies no longer drive the box office like they did pre-pandemic. The piece notes fewer yearly releases in the genre, and that the genre’s box office is down approximately $3.5 billion annually from its highs in 2017-2019. When that backdrop exists, decision-makers should expect more volatility. Even a known property like Supergirl has to fight for attention against multiple forces at once: audience fatigue cycles, shifting release calendars, and the reality that the “default” box-office ceiling for superhero content has lowered.

A related tension is gender-driven performance. The piece highlights that after successes like Wonder Woman ($822 million in 2017) and Captain Marvel ($1.13 billion in 2019), female-fronted superhero movies have taken a downturn. David A. Gross, who runs FranchiseRe, is quoted in the article saying, “You’ll hear general explanations like ‘the audience lost interest.’ Yes, they did,” adding that “no one has been able to explain why it happened so suddenly and so completely. Why female superheroes in particular, after their sensational starts? We don’t understand it either.” That quote is important because it puts the blame in the realm of unexplained demand shifts, not a fixable creative flaw. For boards and studio executives, that matters because it makes planning harder: you cannot simply “audit the script” and assume you solved the real issue.

Now add corporate pressure. The stumble for Supergirl comes as Warner Bros. Discovery, the film studio’s parent company, is preparing to be acquired by Paramount Skydance. David Ellison, Paramount’s chief executive, recently met with Gunn and Safran. That kind of meeting has a dual meaning for executives. First, it signals integration seriousness. Second, it quietly raises stakes for what “next DC” should look like if the new structure must justify capital allocation immediately. The next DC release is Clayface, a body horror take on the DC character, to be released in October. Gunn’s Superman follow-up, Man of Tomorrow, is currently in production, dated for July 2027.

So what does this mean for the people making similar calls elsewhere? Supergirl cost $170 million to make, and the combination of reported test-screen trimming, weak review and audience scores, and a second-place opening behind an animated blockbuster points to a stress test on DC’s whole operating model. When a studio can’t reliably translate brand into opening momentum, it forces more than marketing tweaks. It forces strategy debates: how much risk to greenlight, how much to rely on franchise gravity, and whether to change genre tone to find a fresher demand curve. In the short run, Supergirl has to earn the right to continue playing. In the long run, it tells the market what DC Studios still needs to prove, even as leadership and ownership structures shift.

Elsewhere in the weekend’s scoreboard, the distribution story is equally telling. Paramount Pictures’ Jackass: Best and Last opened with $8.4 million from 2,855 North American theaters on a $10 million cost, while Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, expanded from a small debut on seven screens in New York and Los Angeles, landed $379,104 for a per-screen average of $54,158 after A24 acquired it post-Sundance. The micro-budget horror phenomenon Obsession took third with $9.8 million in its seventh weekend, now collecting $233.9 million domestically and $108.9 million internationally, showing how legs can still happen in the right niche. And Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day slipped to fifth with $8.1 million in domestic theaters in its third weekend, with $193.7 million globally in three weeks. Put together, the weekend reinforces the same executive takeaway: demand is segmenting fast, and performance depends on how well each film matches the moment.