Supergirl is currently reeling from an 80% drop in box office between last Friday and this one, netting just $3.6 million domestically. That’s far behind Minions and Monsters, Toy Story 5 and even Young Washington, the last of which more than doubled that total. What went wrong here?
That’s what everyone is trying to figure out, how Supergirl performed this badly. A new report from THR focuses on a number of things that went on behind the scenes, offering some level of explanation as to why the final cut was as bad as it was. It turns out there were two cuts, one from director Craig Gillespie, and the other from Gunn’s DC Studios.
In the end, as perhaps you might imagine, the DC Studios cut won out after ticking up just two points with test audiences (where it still had poor scores). What was the difference?
Supposedly, test audiences liked the Gillespie version’s song choices, pacing and villain. In that version, the film was 11 minutes longer and featured more of Krem, the main villain, pulled and heavily modified from the comics. The DC Studios version cut that bit, going with the shorter film.
There is also this big dust-up about the “needle drop” song choice in the final Supergirl fight, which ended up being a widely-mocked, soft-spoken cover of Jimmy Eat World’s The Middle. Gillespie previously said that was Gunn’s call. The other song (out of dozens, apparently) that was once the main choice was a cover of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.
I think… all of this misses the point. It’s interesting, to be sure. Some of this sounds like fairly standard studio back and forth, similar to what we’ve heard about many films, but there’s really no evidence here that a Gillespie cut would have changed the movie’s fortunes much, if at all. Spending more time on Krem, who is arguably one of the worst elements of the film, and not because he didn’t have enough screen time, would likely not have gone over well, test audience indicators or not. And we can quibble about a final song choice, but at best you’re going from “this is the worst needle drop ever” to something no one mentions.
The problems with Supergirl happened way before two different cuts of the movie were squaring off against each other. The list is long:
- Supergirl being the second movie in the DCU after Superman
- Craig Gillespie being best known for I, Tonya before this, and having done nothing close to a movie like this
- Writer Ana Nogueira having no experience in this space, and seemingly misunderstanding the source material according to some interviews
- Losing key elements of the graphic novel like its brilliant visuals (and not visually horrendous villain).
- This whole idea, in general, of doing a James Gunn impression, with space bar fights and needle drops during slow-motion circular spinning fight scenes.
All of this was already set in place before these dueling cuts started facing off. And neither of those cuts would have put it in a better spot. I would also argue that, even if Supergirl had been pretty great, that may not have worked, given the headwinds it faced. Movies that are just poorly conceived can bomb, even if they’re amazing. Ironically, one prime example of this is James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, an almost identically-named sequel to what is widely considered the worst DCEU movie. It was a project that never really should have existed at all. It had a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score, but the original movie made 350% more, and Gunn’s bombed with a $168 million global haul. Supergirl may be lucky to make it that high.
Ultimately, this still stops with Gunn and Peter Safran. If the director wasn’t right, they picked him. If they tried to make his version better and it was still bad, well, failure #2. It’s a rough second step for DC, but no, do not do a whole “Release the Gillespie Cut” thing here. Please, no more of that.
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