By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated 1 hour ago

For most DC fans, the critical and commercial failure of Supergirl comes as quite a shock. After all, last year’s Superman was the breakout blockbuster of the summer, earning more at the box office than either of Marvel’s films (The Thunderbolts and The Fantastic Four: First Steps). It was directed by geek king James Gunn, the same man who runs DC Studios. He absolutely loved the script for Supergirl and pushed the movie’s production schedule up. With Gunn’s seal of approval, the spinoff featuring Superman’s cousin seemed destined for greatness. But as the opening weekend projections plummeted and the critical reviews came in, it soon became clear that this movie was a failure. 

What we didn’t know was how much of a failure. Now, we have the answer, and it’s actually much worse than you thought. According to Deadline, the movie is currently set to lose Warner Bros. a cool $125 million. That would be bad news for any blockbuster and in any circumstance. However, Supergirl bombing is that much worse because it’s not just losing the studio plenty of cold, hard cash; it’s also shaking confidence in Gunn’s ability to lead the DCU in its fight with Marvel for box office supremacy. Now, a sobering fact emerges: the DCU may implode long before we even see the new Justice League onscreen.

Playing The Blame Game

Right now, some of the film’s biggest fans are trying to make the movie into another culture war flashpoint. The more militant fans are claiming that Supergirl’s critics are misogynists and incels who just weren’t ready to see a strong woman on the big screen. However, it genuinely seems like Supergirl was doomed more by the forces of apathy than misogyny. The low opening weekend (lower than Morbius, yikes!) is an indicator of how few people actually bothered to see the movie. Plus, in a bit of Morbin’ (er, morbid) irony, Supergirl undermines much of its girlpower street cred because of a very prominent storyline about sex trafficking.  

But how did Deadline arrive at the conclusion that Supergirl will lose the studio $125 million? They looked at factors such as the production cost (somewhere between $170-$186 million) and the movie’s opening weekend box office ($68 million). They also considered how much the domestic publicity and advertising budget was ($120 million) and how much the movie needed to make in order to break even (about $315 million). Throw in the estimates for declining weekly box office, and you get a bleak conclusion: Supergirl is going to lose somewhere around $125 million, making this a very public, very expensive failure for Warner Bros.

The Canary In The Coal Mine

With this kind of box office loss, it’s unlikely that Supergirl will ever headline another future film in the DCU. However, there may be a downstream effect where this impacts larger projects in the future. For example, Supergirl is supposed to be a major character in Superman: The Man of Tomorrow; if audiences hate that film because of her presence, it could spell bad news for James Gunn. If that Superman sequel is a hit, then it will pave the way for Wonder Woman, The Brave and the Bold, and, eventually, a Justice League film. If it bombs, though, the DCU could die before the JL even team up onscreen.

All DC fans should care about Supergirl’s failure because this movie is effectively the canary in the coal mine for the entire cinematic universe. Considering how many skipped seeing Supergirl, how much worse will it be for future projects featuring even more obscure heroes and villains? DC Studios has already shot a Clayface film, and they are currently working on a Deathstroke and Bane movie and a TV show that pairs Jimmy Olsen up with Gorilla Grodd. These are big creative swings, and they might all connect. But even if they all turn out to be excellent, that won’t matter if hardly anybody is watching them.

It’s worth noting that while critics dragged the DCEU for years, it produced about five commercial flops before Warner Bros. pulled the plug. Therefore, it might not be the end of the world now that James Gunn’s DCU has only produced one flop. However, superhero fatigue is dragging down box office earnings, and Gunn is facing stiff competition from Marvel in the form of Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday. Supergirl losing $125 million right before WB gets new leadership potentially changes the game for Gunn, and not in a good way. He’s not going to get five strikes; in fact, he’ll be lucky to get more than one! 

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 30 seconds ago

Star Trek: Voyager wasn’t every fan’s cup of tea, especially if you preferred the darker, more serialized misadventures over on Deep Space Nine. However, Voyager did one thing arguably better than any Trek before or since: demonstrating just how weird exploring the galaxy can get. This is especially true in “Persistence of Vision,” an episode where the crew is forced to have increasingly bizarre hallucinations that cause some characters to reflect on the past. This includes Captain Janeway, who sees a vision of the husband that she left back in the Alpha Quadrant. Other characters hallucinate in different ways, including Chief Engineer B’elana Torres.

Normally, this hotheaded half-Klingon is all business, especially during an emergency. However, she ends up hallucinating a sexual fantasy involving Commander Chakotay, which many fans thought meant that she secretly had feelings for him. Incidentally, Chakotay actor Robert Beltran thought the same thing, and he imagined this episode might be setting up a relationship between their characters in later episodes. However, Torres actor Roxann Dawson pushed back against these claims, arguing there was simply no way that her character would fall in love with the ship’s first officer.

Breaching Her Warp Core

The premise of “Persistence of Vision” begins like many Star Trek: Voyager episodes: with the ship getting ready to make contact with an exotic race of aliens. The Botha are standoffish at first, but are willing to negotiate with Captain Janeway about safe passage through their little corner of the Delta Quadrant. Soon, crew members start seeing wild hallucinations and have no idea why this is happening. Eventually, it is revealed that these hallucinations are being caused by a telepathic Bothan. While everyone sees different things, B’elanna Torres gets an especially spicy fantasy involving Commander Chakotay.

Somewhat disappointingly, we find out that the Bothan caused all these chaotic hallucinations simply because he could. Janeway speculates that the alien might have done everyone a favor by forcing them to confront buried emotions. Because of this, Chakotay actor Robert Beltran believed that Torres must be secretly holding a candle for his own character. In an interview with The Official Star Trek: Voyager Magazine, he said, “That was very interesting to me because it revealed in Torres how she might be feeling about Chakotay. This entity reveals all of our fantasies, and we got to see how she feels about him.”

Carrying A Torch Through The Delta Quadrant

In that same interview, Beltran speculated that his character might harbor secret feelings for Torres. “Maybe he’ll feel the same for her,” he said. “That’s not quite confirmed, but it’s possible, and it sets the stage for some further development of their relationship.” It’s a provocative idea, one that is even explored in Pathways, a Star Trek: Voyager book written by “Persistence of Vision” screenwriter Jeri Taylor. However, one person who has been fighting this interpretation from the very beginning is B’elanna Torres actor Roxann Dawson.

In an interview with Cinefantastique, Dawson said, “the strength of that alien, the way he could get to us as Humans, was that he understands the deep need…we all have to love and to be loved.” She believes that her character’s “trance” was not “a reflection of a direct attraction to Chakotay” but instead “a desire to give in to a side that she does not give into easily…I don’t think that necessarily means that he is always on her mind…it was more of a reflection of her need to please, to fulfill, all of these things are very real, very human.”

Red (Hot) Alert

In other words, since Torres is half-human, half-Klingon, the telepathic trance temporarily brought out human aspects (like being a lonely people pleaser) that she often tries to repress. In another interview with Star Trek Monthly, she opened up about how weird it would be for her character to love Chakotay, someone who is basically a surrogate father to her. “I see Chakotay as a combination of mentor and father figure for B’Elanna. She might have some romantic feelings towards him in a kind of Freudian sense, but I don’t see them getting together on any other level than as a mentor and pupil.”

This is one argument that Roxann Dawson ultimately won. There weren’t many sparks between B’elanna Torres and Commander Chakotay after this, and her character eventually ended up with Robert Duncan McNeil’s Tom Paris. Chakotay remained relatively unlucky in love, never hooking up with Captain Janeway despite lots of heavy-handed flirting. He finally hooked up with Seven of Nine in the last four episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, but they are apparently broken up by the time of Star Trek: Picard. That’s okay, though: Chakotay likely would have been just as checked out of any romantic relationship as Robert Beltran was checked out of his performance!