When the obit on Kara Zor-El as a tentpole character in the DCU is read, it’ll read “executive failure,” as Supergirl’s kryptonite is the global box office. DSR has written a ton in recent weeks, including last week’s box office report from yours truly, today’s article from Andre Porter, and Jon Escudero’s aggregation of the post-production qualms.
Last week’s report specifically hinged the initial failure of the project on a number of things: the decision to make the second theatrical film in the universe a character that isn’t well-known outside of its fanbase unlike a Batman or Wonder Woman and the inability to market a film toward other quadrants of the consumer beyond comic book die-hards, both of which we did an exhaustive exploration on, but there were other indictments such as James Gunn’s recent issues with the trades. But the biggest indictment of the film isn’t that they couldn’t draw audiences to the theatres, it’s that the few people they did bring, while not as negative as the trades, were so lukewarm that the word-of-mouth couldn’t prevent a disastrous second weekend drop. At this point, that’s the on the film itself, and for the amount of talk that Gunn has given that they’d only produce the best scripts, the lack of any cohesion with previous projects such as Superman and Peacemaker, both of which won audiences over and breathed life back into DC as a viable property, is the first major speedbump in the road to building a DC universe. The film, in its second weekend, finished fourth at the box office this week and it’s hard to blame anybody but the studio. Going forward, expect Supergirl to be in the universe, but not as a primary focus, similar to Hulk in the MCU after its blunder post-Iron Man.
Supergirl seeing a 77% drop, when industry standard ranges from 50-55%, the latter of range that represents theToy Story 5 drop in its third weekend we’ll be discussing momentarily, is simply put: terrible. There may have been some hope that the 75% audience score could represent decent word-of-mouth, but even those that like it don’t seem to love it, as represented by the B- CinemaScore. It’s unfortunate, but this shouldn’t be too surprising. It remains to be seen if Peter Safran will take on a more public image now that Supergirl has been dead on arrival, to make sure that Gunn makes tentpoles that Safran can adequetely market. While this point in the universe isn’t about profit as much as it is gaining audience trust to prioritize long-term profit, which is the strategy Marvel took in Phase I, this didn’t seem to gain audience trust or make money, making it an objective failure. Even in its second weekend, Supergirl found itself underperforming estimates. Expect these numbers to continue to sink as the studio has already confirmed the VOD date for July.
Animation was king this week, as Minions & Monsters opened at number one. However, it has to feel like this is a disappointment despite that. In their last film, the minions brought in $940M in 2022. In 2024, Despicable Me 4 brought in $972M at the box office. It’s not as though this is a spinoff that isn’t on par with the gross of previous films, in fact, the previous Minions film was the highest-grossing domestically of any film within the Despicable Me IP. To say that an opening of $36M for Minions & Monsters, the first of the Minions trilogy to actually be acclaimed critically, is disappointing would be an understatement. On an $85M budget and a $159M global opening, this will easily turn a profit, as Illumination continues to be one of the most robust animation departments in the world in terms of budget efficiency. However, a $36.4M domestic opening is not the opening of a billion dollar film over the course of a five day weekend, especially for a family film which tend to open rather large. For comparison, Minions: Rise of Gru opened to over $125M over its Independence Day weekend.
The question isn’t why didn’t this film make money, because it will make money. The question is why didn’t it make more money? To editorialize, the theatre that I saw Minions & Monsters at was almost entirely adults. There were maybe three children in this movie. That raises some serious concerns in the short-term of diminishing returns: if your audience is primarily college students, why isn’t the movie you’re marketing toward eight years olds connecting with that?
The college audience makes sense, considering people in their early-to-mid 20s would’ve been in their formative years when the first Despicable Me was in theatres, allowing a sense of nostalgia for the minions as characters. It also represents a decent health long-term because when these kids become parents, they’ll take their children to the minions. But that also may explain the diminishing returns in the interim: you’re only as good as your last offering, and after how poorly the Rise of Gru installment was, parents may have been unwilling to pay premium dollar to take their kids to see this theatrically.
At the end of the day, it’s a movie that has Christoph Waltz as its primary human voice, focuses on gag reels from very classic Hollywood, and was about moviemaking. It’s hard to sell a Minions movie as an arthouse film, and most kids aren’t going to understand what “play it again, Sam” means as a guy sits at a piano playing Dooley Wilson’s As Time Goes By. Though, if we did start showing kids Casablanca and other classics at a young age, perhaps we’d be better off as a society.
Coming in second in its secondary week with a 56% drop is Toy Story 5, which as we’ve been projecting since the start of the box office report, is destined to become the third consecutive Toy Story film to make $1B at the box office. While a 56% drop may seem steep, Toy Story 5 made $31M in its third weekend. It’s already made over $760M and doesn’t seem to be slowing down globally. There’s not much to discuss here that we hadn’t previously gone over in the last two weeks of the box office report, but it will be interesting to see how the live-action Moana hurts its momentum if Minions couldn’t, as Minions is a direct competitor in the animation realm, though Moana is a popular IP from the same parent company as Toy Story.
In third, a movie we at DSR/CBC don’t really know what to do with in Young Washington. It’s not a surprise this did well because Angel Studios do have their own niche carved out, this was about the first American President while he fought the American Revolution releasing on Independence Day weekend, the perfect time for the release, and Chris Pratt gave it a glowing review that picked up steam. But its $20M may be hollow, as Angel Studios has been proven in the past to fluff their numbers, and this movie did use a ‘pass it forward’ QR campaign at the end of its film to purchase tickets for people who may not have bought tickets, leading to it screening in a number of empty theatres that were touted as sold out, the same playbook used in previous films such as Sound of Freedom. This makes analyzing its results a tad muddy, so DSR will leave it at this: if this number is legitimate, that’s a great number! The more demographics that have something to go see that’s a viable business, the healthier the industry will be as a whole, and that’s encouraging. If it’s not a legitimate number, then eventually we’re going to have to figure out how to temper and adjust, though it’s not like the literary community has adjusted to the years of FEC reports that point to PAC’s buying out stocks of books from their authors to inflate their sales totals.
The next new release in the top ten was The Invite, which doesn’t even release wide until this upcoming weekend, though the Olivia Wilde comedy has gotten rave reviews. With a film playing in just 28 theatres being in the top ten, this is indicative of a robust summer blockbuster market that unfortunately doesn’t allow for much choice in the box office. With the overperformances of Obsession and Backrooms, which the box office report has covered ad nauseam, the continued strength of Michael, as well as recent holdovers such as a Steven Spielberg sci-fi original, a new Jackass installment, and a profitable Scary Movie, studios looked at this current slate alongside what was eyeing to be two billion dollar films, with another potentially billion dollar film in Nolan’s The Odyssey in two weeks and determined that this isn’t the best time to put a smaller movie in theatres because there’s no avenue to breakthrough the noise. Counterprogramming only works when nobody wants to see the current programming.
The top ten this week went: Minions & Monsters, Toy Story 5, Young Washington, Supergirl, Disclosure Day, Obsession, Backrooms, Jackass: The Best and Last, Scary Movie, The Invite.
Coming this weekend other than The Invite, which stars Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz, Ed Norton, and Olivia Wilde, is another black comedy Gail Daugherty and the Celebrtiy Sex Pass, which features Zoey Deutch trying to track down Jon Hamm after her fiance sleeps with his celebrity sex pass. But the big releases are Evil Dead Burn the aforementioned Moana.
The latter is the most fascinating to follow, because at its budget, it’ll need to make at least $650M. With Moana being the most streamed film in Disney Plus history and the sequel making over $1B just a year and a half ago, in theory that doesn’t sound that far-fetched. But it’s projected at an $85M opening and the projections consistently go lower. We’ll discuss more as to why it may underperform next week when we see how it performs, but the fact remains: Dwayne Johnson hasn’t sold a profitable movie on his face in a decade, and the beloved animated classic is still so new that people may not be nostalgic enough for a live-action just yet.
For Evil Dead Burn, this should be an easy profit for a Warner Bros that is having a far tougher 2026 than they did 2025. With a budget of $20M, if it matches the domestic haul of the last installment, Evil Dead Rise, it’ll clear an easy profit from just the domestic total alone, much less worldwide gross. The previous Lee Cronin installment was very well received, and the $25-$30M tracking is very strong for a project of its caliber. Like Moana, we’ll discuss more next week.
Photo credit: Illimuniation
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.