The new DCU is running into some troubles early as its second feature film, Supergirl, not only doesn’t open at number one, something which proponents of the film rightfully argued was in and of itself an unenviable position considering it’s the second weekend of the most beloved Disney animated franchise of all-time, but it also can’t even match the opening weekend of Morbius. Toy Story 5, to the surprise of nobody, finished first for the second week in a row, but there’s some cool history made this week in our holdover groups.
The 56% drop for Toy Story 5 is higher than some pundits may have anticipated, but overall is a very solid, healthy drop, especially for a film that nearly opened to infinity and beyond. The $70M approximated cume this weekend domestically is higher than most films will open to this year, and the film is already threatening $300M domestic in its first ten days. Its international box office to this point has trailed its domestic a little bit, whereas 2019’s Toy Story 4 box office was carried over the billion mark by its international performance. That said, the film doesn’t open until July for both Japan and Germany, as well as other international territories, thanks in part to the timing of the World Cup and the upcoming release of Minions and Monsters, the latter of which is a direct competition for the family demographic. The legs so far suggest that it will not only be the third film in the franchise to cross the billion threshold, but do so by the largest of margins as well.
Moreover, the movie everybody is interested in performance wise this week is that of House of the Dragon and Sirens star Milly Alcock’s first feature-length leading role, Supergirl. Alcock herself is actually pretty solid in the film, nailing the personification of Kara Zor-el, as is Jason Momoa’s turn as Lobo. But James Gunn’s edict of “we make what the best script is” has to be a PR puff piece, otherwise the DCU, despite the success and quality of 2025’s Superman, is going to be dead-on-arrival. While the script isn’t nearly as atrocious as some trades make it out to be, it is clearly a first-draft script they went into production with that gave its talent very little to work with. The strength of script rumor was the only justification for Supergirl. A comic heroine less published than Black Canary, a character whose only mainstream leading apppearance was the panned Helen Slater film from the mid-’80s, and a film that’s going to get mixed reviews at best was always a long shot for success, compared to say…Batman. Or Wonder Woman. Or Aquaman. Or any far more established hero culturally speaking. The film is eyeing a loss upward of $200M strictly from the box office perspective, and it’d be like if the MCU had followed up Iron Man with Ant Man. Obviously, the underperformance of The Incredible Hulk led to not only re-casting the role, but also moving the character to a supporting role amongst the Avengers. But at least there was a public awareness of who the Hulk is as a hero outside of the comic book fans, and it made its budget back ,which Supergirl may not even do. The most damning statistic for Supergirl is that 59% of the audience, per PostTrak, is male. In a time where The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Housemaid, Colleen Hoover adaptations, and a number of other projects geared toward woman are hitting big at the box office, one also has to question the marketing and why it wasn’t able to breakthrough the comic book fandom and bring women into the theatres. Regardless, this is the first big miss of Gunn’s DCU. For the record, consider the strength of the numbers for House of the Dragon. Don’t believe the culture war argument that people just don’t want to watch Milly Alcock. But this presents a larger problem: if the DCU can’t market outside of their built in audience, how is Clayface going to do later this year? Sure, its budget is microscopic relative to its comic book counterparts, but it’s still the largest budget in history for a body-horror, while also being based on a second-tier Batman villain before they even cast Batman. At $40M, it’ll need to make at least $100M to make a profit, at least on paper. The highest-grossing strictly body horror film of all-time is Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, which made ~$80M. With crossover appeal larger than the genre itself and a built-in second audience, it’s not necessarily unreasonable, but if they can’t market outside of the DC faithful, it probably doesn’t stand a chance when you consider a lot of the DC faithful will only show out for the tentpole characters this early into the universe.
DC Studios CEO Peter Safran issued a statement that reads “While Supergirl didn’t meet our box office expectations, it’s just one component of a broader, long-term strategy at DC that we remain confident in.”
Obsession continues to have audiences obsess over it, as it’s still making $9.8M on the weekend after 45 days in theatres, more than half of its initial opening weekend. If Curry Barker used his one wish willow on making a theatrical hit, it landed, because it’s now tied with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners for the highest-grossing live-action original film of the decade. It is one of two movies currently in theatres to place in the top 10 highest-grossing horror films domestically ever, alongside Kane Parsons Backrooms, which finished sixth this weekend for A24. Backrooms is getting a re-release in July with additional footage, a director’s cut billed as the Everything Must Go edition, that should help it climb up that list even farther.
Rounding out the top five is newcomer Jackass: The Best and Last, and holdover Disclosure Day. The Jackass film opened to only $8.4M, a significant decrease from the $23M in 2022 for Jackass Forever. The caveat for this is that it’s not exactly a wholly original film, as it features a substantial amount of compilations of previous entries, unlike Forever. But it’s still not a good sign, and at least it’s already going to seemingly be the finale as it begins to show diminishing returns for Johnny Knoxville and his buddies. But hey, an $8M opening for the fifth feature-length film based off an MTV slapstick reality show from the millennium in 2026 is nothing to sneeze at. At least the crew has something to celebrate this weekend with their old pal Sami Zayn finally becoming WWE Champion. Disclosure Day, while not a box office juggernaut, should at least surpass $200M in the next day, making profitability improbable instead of impossible. It needs $300M to reach profitability for Universal.
The only other new film that hasn’t been covered in a previous DSR BO report in the top ten this week is BLEACH: Thousand-Year Blood War—The Calamity. This represents the final season for the Adult Swim anime series, and as a specialty showing, shouldn’t have any real, tangible long-term outlook for the theatres. Alongside it rounding out the top ten are Paramount’s Scary Movie, LucasFilm’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, and NEON’s Leviticus. All are wrapping up their theatrical windows relatively soon.
Looking ahead, we have two potential billion dollar films opening over the next fortnight. Minions and Monsters is coming off of 2022’s The Rise of Gru, which made $940M at the box office. This particular iteration of the Minions IP is getting exceptional praise in the early reviews. It’ll be interesting to see how much it can stifle Toy Story’s week three growth, but it should, theoretically, absolutely capitulate the last little bit of Supergirl. The following week is an entirely different demographic as The Odyssey eyes an opening of $100M, which would put it in the top five largest opening weekends of all-time for an R-rated picture. Its legs should also do well as its stranglehold on PLFs such as IMAX is driving long-term forecasting to predict a smaller-than-usual drop. Nolan’s films are an event, and if an R-rated three hour, half black-and-white historical period piece biopic about a physicist threatened $1B, his vision for one of the most beloved pieces of literature should easily crack it. DSR and CBC, of course, have extensively covered the record-shattering pre-sales for The Odyssey.
Funny we should reference Oppenheimer, though, because it, as of today, is no longer the highest-grossing biopic of all-time. Michael finished just outside of the domestic top ten this weekend, but it did make enough to topple Oppenheimer for the record. Lionsgate is expected to keep in theaters long enough to get $22M more out of it for their first billion dollar film, though its overseas performances still legging out will figure to do a vast majority of the heavy lifting. Michael is proving that audiences still want to rock with the King of Pop all night in 2026.
Photo credit: DC Studios, Warner Bros.
Jameus Mooney is an entertainment writer for Comicbook Clique, having covered the entertainment industry for years. You can follow him on Twitter here, and Letterboxd here. You can also listen to his horror podcast, The 2:17 Horror Podcast, at the DeathArts XIII YouTube channel.