http://busingers.ca/?p=778 Gideon, what have you told us at all? Make a sound, come down off the wall Religion should appeal to the hearts of the young Who are you? What have you become? You animal C’mon
At first light a woman proceeds along the margin of the sea carrying beneath one arm a shallow basket in which lie the pale remains of those small creatures whose habitation the water has surrendered. At intervals she lowers herself and commits one to the sand and rises again without examining what has been left behind, and the spaces between these white emblems come into being by no reckoning that can be discerned in the ground itself but only by the measure she bears within her and which remains inaccessible even to her own accounting. The tide advances and withdraws. Wind moves over the open beach. Birds descend to the wrack and depart from it. Behind her pass those who seek what the sea relinquishes and those content merely to accompany the morning until it becomes day, and they alter their course among the scattered white forms without remark, each step entering into relation with those already taken so that the shore acquires an order that belongs neither to intention nor accident but to the continual acknowledgment that one thing follows another and that sequence itself possesses a gravity apart from purpose. She reaches into the basket. At length there remains nothing to remove from it. The sea continues in its exchanges with the land. The shells abide where they have been placed until they do not. The woman turns toward the light and goes on.
Supergirl’s failure at the box office is less about one bad movie than about a structural change in audience behavior.
For roughly 15 years, Hollywood operated under the assumption that franchise recognition could compensate for everything else. If a film carried a superhero logo, belonged to a cinematic universe, and cost $200 million, there was a reasonable chance it would become an event. That assumption has weakened considerably.
The first change is economic. Ticket prices have climbed, streaming has improved, and audiences have become much more selective.
Moviegoers no longer ask, “What’s playing?” They ask, “What’s worth leaving home for?” A character they know vaguely is no longer enough.
The second change is that intellectual property has diminishing returns. Studios treated comic-book characters as interchangeable assets. They aren’t.
Batman is not Blue Beetle. Spider-Man is not Morbius. Superman is not Supergirl. Recognition exists on a spectrum, and studios often budget films as though every recognizable character has roughly the same commercial ceiling. They do not.
The third change is that shared universes have lost much of their novelty. In 2008, the promise that a story connected to something larger was exciting. In 2026, it is expected.
Connected universes have become infrastructure rather than spectacle. Simply telling audiences that this film matters to the larger mythology doesn’t create urgency anymore.
There’s also a creative issue. Much of modern blockbuster filmmaking has become risk-averse. Studios spend enormous sums minimizing risk, which often produces movies that feel professionally assembled rather than essential. When audiences sense that a film exists because a release calendar required it, rather than because someone had a compelling story to tell, they wait for streaming.
Hollywood also continues to misunderstand what “franchise fatigue” means. It isn’t fatigue with superheroes. It’s fatigue with mediocrity. Audiences still show up for films they believe are exceptional. They ignored weaker entries while embracing films that generated genuine enthusiasm. The genre isn’t dying. The middle of the genre is.
Finally, there is a budgeting problem. Spending $170–250 million on every franchise installment leaves almost no margin for error. A movie doesn’t have to be terrible to become a financial disaster. It merely has to be “pretty good.” When break-even requires $600–700 million worldwide, “pretty good” isn’t enough.
If those trends continue, expect studios to make fewer mega-budget films centered on secondary characters and more films with either iconic leads or significantly smaller budgets.
The era when almost any superhero could justify a $200 million investment may have met its kryptonite..
