Supergirl Lost Warner Bros. About $100 Million. Tomorrow It Costs You Nothing. Here Is Whether to Press Play.

Here is the shape of the summer Supergirl had. It opened on June 26 against the second weekend of Toy Story 5 and took in $37.1 million, which sounds like a lot of money until you learn that the production budget was somewhere between $170 million and $186 million. The second weekend fell 76 percent. It finished at $72 million domestic and about $126 million worldwide, and trade estimates put the studio's loss somewhere around $100 million. We called it the first real setback for the rebooted DC Universe in our summer box office scorecard, and nothing since has changed that read.

Tomorrow, September 10, it arrives on HBO Max. And here is the thing about streaming: the budget stops mattering. Nobody watching at home is on the hook for $170 million. The only question left is whether 108 minutes of your Wednesday night is a fair trade. It is a much easier question, and the answer is a qualified yes.

What the movie actually is

Forget the origin story you are picturing. Supergirl is adapted from Woman of Tomorrow, the 2021 miniseries by Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely, which is less a superhero comic than a space western with a Kryptonian in it. Kara Zor-El is 23, jaded, and roaming the galaxy with her dog Krypto. A pirate called Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts) poisons the dog and steals her ship. A young girl named Ruthye (Eve Ridley), whose family Krem killed, attaches herself to Kara's pursuit. The comic wears its True Grit influence openly, and so does the film.

Director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Cruella) and writer Ana Nogueira made real changes on the way to the screen. The biggest is Jason Momoa as Lobo, the alien bounty hunter who is nowhere in the source material and here becomes Kara's reluctant third wheel. David Corenswet's Superman appears, Krypto carries over from last summer's Superman, and the whole thing is shot anamorphic by Rob Hardy (Mission: Impossible: Fallout, Civil War), which gives it a wider, more textured look than the usual DC house style.

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The one thing every critic agreed on

The reviews split almost exactly down the middle: 53 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 372 critics, a 50 on Metacritic, a B minus CinemaScore. But read the actual reviews and the disagreement is not about Milly Alcock. It is about everything around her.

Milly Alcock brings a swagger to Kara Zor-El that'd make Krypton proud in this otherwise familiar origin story, dawning a promising new hero in the DCU who's still waiting for an adventure that matches her vigor.Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus

That consensus is the whole argument in one sentence. Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian gave it three stars and called it "sprightly and sparkling." Owen Gleiberman at Variety called it "numbingly flat." Amy Nicholson at the Los Angeles Times called it a "hot mess" that "thrives on chaos but settles for convention." Those three people saw the same movie and none of them disagreed about the lead. The praise for Alcock is close to universal: she plays Kara as someone who has spent too long alone out there and does not want to be anyone's hero, and she makes that funnier and sadder than the script around her does.

The complaints cluster around two things. The plot is a chase across planets that critics kept describing as familiar, and Krem is a villain several reviewers called generic. The film also changed composers twice during production and reportedly had its post-production taken over by the studio after mixed test screenings, which is the kind of thing you can sometimes feel in a movie's rhythm even when you cannot name it.

Why it bombed, and why that should not decide your evening

The theatrical failure had a lot of causes that have nothing to do with what is on screen. It opened a week after Toy Story 5 and three weeks before Nolan's The Odyssey. Warner Bros. reportedly spent around $120 million on marketing built on 80 plus brand tie-ins, for a character most of the general audience knew only from a brief cameo at the end of Superman. And it was the second DCU feature in under a year to ask people to learn a new universe from scratch. Audiences who did show up scored it a B minus, which in CinemaScore terms means "fine, would not have paid full price."

That is precisely the movie HBO Max is good for. Nobody paid full price. The question is no longer "was this worth $170 million," it is "is this better than the third rewatch of something you already know," and for the specific audience below, it clearly is.

The part that matters for the DCU

Here is the strange coda. Supergirl lost the studio a nine figure sum, and Alcock's stock went up anyway. She is confirmed to return in Man of Tomorrow, James Gunn's Superman sequel, which wrapped filming at the end of August and opens July 9, 2027. DC Studios co-chief Peter Safran has said she is "a major part of what we're doing." That is the outcome of a bad summer: a franchise that lost money on the movie and kept the asset.

It also makes the DC movies ranked conversation more interesting than it was in May. Where does a well acted, badly received, financially disastrous movie go in a tier list? Above Black Adam, almost certainly. Above The Flash, probably. Above Shazam!? That is the kind of call that only gets settled by putting them head to head, which is the entire reason Shortlist exists.

How to watch

• HBO Max: streaming worldwide from Wednesday, September 10, including a version performed in American Sign Language.
• HBO linear: premieres Saturday, September 12.
• Disc: 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD arrived September 8 if you want the anamorphic photography at full bitrate.
• Runtime: 108 minutes, rated PG-13.

One last piece of context. Supergirl is not the only summer miss coming home this month. Backrooms, the A24 horror hit that cost less than $10 million and made nearly $400 million, lands on HBO Max on September 25, and Toy Story 5 hits Disney+ on September 23. If you want the full picture of what went right and wrong this summer before you rank any of it, the summer 2026 box office scorecard has all the numbers in one place.

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