Emma Bono ‘30
Guest Writer
On July 31, 2026, “SpiderMan: A Brand New Day” opened and has become the third highest grossing film ever, earning a total of $2.345 billion worldwide. Not only has it seen financial success, but critical and fan acclaim as well, with a 91% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 4.1 on Letterboxd.
However, a little more than a month before this mega movie opened, DC’s “Supergirl” opened with an estimated $38 million in box office sales, and would conclude its run with $125.9 million, making it the lowest grossing modern live action DCU movie. The reason people claimed it was so bad? Superhero fatigue, with Variety’s Parisa Taghizadeh writing in an article from July 2026 about “Supergirl”, “Audiences are also experiencing a general sense of superhero fatigue thanks to an oversaturated marketplace bursting with sequels, spinoffs and second-tier heroes with weak IP” But, if audiences are experiencing a sense of superhero fatigue and are bored of sequels, why is it that “Spiderman: A Brand New Day”, the fourth movie in Marvel’s current Spiderman saga do so well?
I believe it’s because audiences and studio executives don’t want to make or see movies about female superheroes. The first female superhero movie didn’t release in theaters until 1984. It saw mediocre reviews and a box office, and from then till 2005, created a trend of female focused superhero movies coming out every few years, seeing the same response until 2005, when “Elektra” would end this trend. It wasn’t until 2017 that the next female lead superhero lead movie, “Wonder Woman” would be released. “Captain Marvel” (2019) would be the first female superhero movie to make a billion dollars, a feat that 11 superhero movies had already made. Taking a look at the box office, 8 female lead superhero movies have come out since 2020, with a combined total of $1.9 billion.
I believe that “Superhero fatigue” is a manufactured term created by studio executives who don’t want to fund movies that center on female superheroes. Superhero movies will always be popular, but they don’t want to be called misogynistic, so they make a movie featuring a female superhero, give it a lower budget, put a crew that has little experience on it, and leave it be. When it comes out to a low box office and low critic and audience scores, studios will blame superhero fatigue, and, knowing that the reason for this so-called fatigue is because of their low quality films.
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