In the entertainment marketing space, distinction is everything. The way that any piece of media is able to truly take hold of the zeitgeist is by presenting something that feels new, or at least substantially different from what is already populating the space in copious amounts.
Ironically, this is something that James Gunn and his team at DC Studios seemed to understand extremely well last year, when they so savvily positioned the DCU’s debut theatrical film, Superman, as a hopeful alternative to not only the bulk of modern blockbusters but also to the world at large. In an era of doom and gloom, the combination of Superman’s old-fashioned optimism with the film’s surprisingly prescient political angle made for a film that got modern audiences to turn out in droves and really resonated with many of them.
Which is why it’s so surprising to see that same team get it so completely wrong when it comes to their latest release, Supergirl.
The second DCU film was released ahead of the Fourth of July holiday weekend and is underperforming at the box office, being berated by critics, and not exactly registering well in the opinion of general audiences either. There’s much to be said about the quality, or lack thereof, when it comes to Supergirl, but for the purposes of this, I’d like to talk more specifically about the marketing and lead-up to the film’s release. Because the truth is, Supergirl was set up for failure from the get-go because releasing it so soon after Superman was never a good idea.
Gunn and co. clearly believed otherwise, feeling that the character of Supergirl having a brief cameo at the tail end of the successful Superman would be enough to entice audiences to come back to see her further adventures the following summer. However, this is an outdated understanding of the way modern multiplexes work. It isn’t hard to see what they were going for; they wanted this to be akin to how Captain Marvel coasted to an easy billion-dollar box office less than a year after Avengers: Infinity War ended with a direct tease of the character and her story. But there are a few key differences between this dynamic and the one of those Marvel films.
For starters, 2018 was a different era. Marvel and their interconnected superhero universe were dominating the cultural conversation, and Infinity War came at the peak of all of that. So yes, Captain Marvel, quality not withstanding, became a smash hit off the back of the promise of the character being involved in Infinity War’s follow-up, Avengers: Endgame. But in 2025, Superman wasn’t a success because it was the culmination of anything. Rather, the exact opposite is true.
It was a success specifically because it was a new beginning and a singular filmic experience. Thus, pulling this ‘come back next summer’ trick was never going to work as well. But also, Captain Marvel was able to bring something at least somewhat unique to its marketing by virtue of not having the same title or logo as the preceding films. Supergirl’s marketing leant hard on the character’s relation to Superman as a character and as a film. It even pulled the exact same trick of not having the film’s title appear in many of the marketing materials, instead defaulting to simply showing the character’s “S” emblem, which, should you need reminding, was exactly the same as Superman’s, but with a tiny bit of post-hoc pink embellishment around it, to emphasize that they were swinging for a female audience in the more trite of ways.
If there’s any film that Supergirl’s marketing actually reminds me of in recent memory, it is 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. That sequel was absolutely phenomenal; critics loved it and audiences who saw it enjoyed it immensely. And yet, like Supergirl, it was released less than a year after the prior installment and underperformed at the box office. Bone Temple’s marketing was full of the titular bone temple, but so was all of the marketing for the previous film, 28 Years Later. As such, it became incredibly difficult for the sequel to separate itself from the prior film when it came to communicating en masse with general audiences.
The marketing wasn’t presenting much of anything different to them, and so they didn’t feel a need to show up and see it. I think the same is true with Supergirl, whose marketing was left little choice but to lean into the Superman relation, given just how closely the films were releasing, but ultimately siphoned off their own chances at success in the process.
If there had been more time between these films, it could have made a huge difference. But as it stands, Supergirl failed to make an impact, which doesn’t exactly bode well for Gunn and co., given that they have another Superman movie releasing next summer, which now runs the risk of running up against many of these same similarity-based marketing issues.
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