Dan Murrell has run the Supergirl numbers, and there is no version of them that Warner Bros. Discovery is going to like: a projected theatrical loss of $244.3 million.
The box office analyst broke down the math on his latest show, calling the film not just a disappointment but a “box office catastrophe” and preemptively shutting the door on every spin attempt to come: “There is no rosy financial picture here. There’s no way to spin this. There’s no way to say, ‘Well, it’s a success if you look at it this way.'”
The Math: How Supergirl Loses $244 Million
Murrell’s model works off theatrical grosses only, so no ancillaries, no streaming value, just what the movie earns in theaters against what it cost to put there. That’s what counts.
The reported production budget is $175 million (though Deadline recently said even higher at $186M), and Murrell cites a reported $120 million spent by Warner Bros. on advertising and distribution, putting total costs at $295 million.
Against that, Supergirl barely cracked $100 million worldwide.
Here’s the full breakdown, using standard studio rental rates (the studio’s cut of each ticket, which Murrell labels the “investor cut”):
Take the $50.7 million Warner Bros. actually keeps, subtract it from $295 million in costs, and you land on a theatrical loss of $244,306,781.
One Of The Worst Second-Weekend Drops Ever
Getting here required a historic collapse, and Supergirl delivered one.
The film dropped 76.82% in its second weekend, the sixth-worst drop of all time for a movie in 3,000+ theaters, landing just behind Mortal Engines at 76.83%.
As Murrell notes, a couple of films on that all-time list survived it: Five Nights at Freddy‘s was a cheap day-and-date release that opened to $80 million, and Fifty Shades of Grey spawned two sequels.
Joker 2 is also there with an 81.4% drop.
The second-weekend collapse followed a $37 million opening that was, in Murrell’s words, “in many ways catastrophic” itself.
Even The $100 Million Brand Defense Fails
Murrell also torched the talking point already circulating that Supergirl received “$100 million in marketing value” from brand partnerships, so the P&A number shouldn’t count against it.
Fine, he says: credit every dollar of it. “Even if you write that cost down against the theatrical loss, that’s still a loss of $144 million theatrically. This is going to be a massive money loser for DC and for Warner Brothers.”
When your best-case defense still loses $144 million, you don’t have a defense.
The Blame Game Has Begun
Murrell closed by noting what we’ve been covering all along: “the blame game has already started,” pointing to THR’s report on the creative squabbles behind the scenes, “which is what you often see when a movie doesn’t do well.”
He’s right, and it goes higher than the filmmakers.
Puck’s Matt Belloni and Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw just named Gunn and Peter Safran Hollywood’s biggest losers of 2026, and the loss now sits comfortably beyond even the $200 million bomb math we ran when the second weekend cratered.
This is the worst-case scenario we called back in May.
The tracking said it, the opening confirmed it, the second weekend sealed it, and now the math has a final-ish number attached: $244 million, give or take a dead-cat bounce.
As Murrell put it, there’s no angle where Supergirl is anything other than “not just a box office disappointment, but a box office catastrophe.”
We’ll see what DC does from here. So will David Ellison.
