Supergirl soars, Muse roar back: the week ahead in screens and sound

Supergirl opened big and landed hard. Two weekends into its theatrical run, the DC Studios feature headlined by Milly Alcock is heading into a projected 60 percent drop at the domestic box office over the July 4 holiday frame, with Universal and Illumination's "Minions & Monsters" on track to lead the weekend with an $80 million haul, according to Variety's June 30 box office report. Out at the Marquee this week, Muse are also back, with the Devon trio returning to the road and to streaming ahead of a fresh studio set that the band's official channels have been teasing since spring. Two very different spectacles, two very different audiences, and a single question hanging over the week: whether each can find its second wind when the public first-week glow fades.

The contrast is the story. On the one hand, a comic-book tentpole built on a global press tour, a young lead actress who broke through in HBO's House of the Dragon, and a marketing apparatus that can land a poster on every bus shelter from Los Angeles to London. On the other, a three-piece rock act approaching its third decade on the festival main stages, still anchored by the Bellamy brothers and the drumming of Dominic Howard, and still drawing the kind of singalong crowds that have fuelled their stadium run since "Supermassive Black Hole" redefined what a Muse chorus could sound like. Both products are now entering the phase where the audience is no longer discovering them, but deciding whether to come back.

The girl of steel hits gravity

The Supergirl opening was real, but the second-weekend math is unforgiving. Variety's June 30 dispatch projects the James Gunn-produced film will fall roughly 60 percent against its debut frame as Illumination's seventh "Despicable Me" instalment, "Minions & Monsters," muscles into prime July 4 real estate with an $80 million target. The shift is less a referendum on Alcock, who carries the picture, and more a familiar pattern for DC releases of recent memory: a loud opening built on pre-awareness, followed by an industry-jaw-clench second weekend once the casual viewer has spoken. Variety's Daily Variety podcast, dated June 29, framed the situation in plainer terms, with the outlet's Jack Dunn characterising the frame as "a rough weekend for 'Supergirl' and a big frame for 'Toy Story 5' and 'Michael.'" The competition is not just another superhero entry. It is a Pixar sequel and a Michael Jackson biopic, two products with built-in family and nostalgia gravity.

What is happening beneath the headline numbers is more interesting than the numbers themselves. The comic-book theatrical model now lives or dies on its second-weekend retention, because the opening week is largely a marketing delivery system rather than a true word-of-mouth measurement. A 60 percent drop does not, on its own, mean the film is failing. It means the marketing apparatus has deposited its audience and the cultural conversation has moved on. The conversation this week, judging by Variety's coverage, has moved on to little yellow men.

The three-piece that refuses to decay

Muse are a useful counter-case. The band released its debut album, "Showbiz," in 1999 and has since moved through "Origin of Symmetry," "Absolution," "Black Holes and Revelations," "The Resistance" and "Drones," a discography that has notched up the kind of catalogue depth most acts would envy. Their Wikipedia entry, refreshed in late June, lists the trio's core lineup as Matt Bellamy, Chris Wolstenholme and Dominic Howard, with the band now operating out of bases in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as their native Devon. They are touring, releasing singles, and showing no sign of the polite fade-out that commonly greets bands this deep into their career. The muse playbook in 2026 looks closer to that of an arena-act heritage brand than that of a nostalgia circuit.

Touring has become the engine. With recorded-music margins compressed by streaming economics, the live tier is where legacy rock acts actually make money, and Muse have spent the back half of the 2020s staffing accordingly. The band is expected to spend the back half of the summer on festival and headline dates that double as listening parties for the new material, an arrangement that lets them test songs on crowds before they are committed to a record. Audiences in 2026 expect older catalogue. They also expect proof of forward motion. Muse's task in the week ahead is to deliver both without leaning too hard on either.

The theatrical-vs-streaming economy underneath both

Read together, the two releases sit on opposite sides of a structural fault line that runs through the contemporary entertainment business. Supergirl was built for the IMAX screen. Its release strategy involved the global theatre circuit, a coordinated press tour and the kind of placement that depends on a viewer physically showing up at a multiplex. Muse, by contrast, run on a touring-and-platform hybrid: festival headline slots, in-flight streams, a back-catalogue that lives permanently on the major DSPs, and a younger audience that discovers them through TikTok edits of older live footage as much as through any radio push. The question each product faces in its second week is in some sense the same question, asked of two industries in different stages of answering it. Did the first contact hold, or does the work need a new approach to keep the audience close?

The economic pressure on theatrical is more visible. Variety's box office note lands on the same day Variety also published a separate piece examining why Comcast is splitting NBCUniversal and its Sky operations away from the cable division, a structural reshuffle that says a great deal about how the parent conglomerate views the future of pay-television revenue. The decision does not directly affect Supergirl's run, but the timing is hard to ignore. Theatrical's parent companies are quietly reorganising the businesses around it, while the films themselves fight for weekends.

The parallel shelf the wire barely names

The week's other releases offer a useful reminder of how much cultural product is moving at once. The Guardian's culture desk this week ran an extended conversation with Rubén Blades, the 25-Grammy salsa musician and Harvard-trained lawyer who served as Panama's tourism minister; he is playing the UK this summer with a career-spanning set that runs from the barrios of Panama City to the global stages he now headlines alongside the acts he once inspired, including, the piece notes, Bad Bunny. In film, Kieu Chinh is returning to Vietnam for the first time in competition, bringing "Chrysalis," Daniel K. Winn's adaptation of her memoir, to the Danang Film Festival, a 68-year career arc that took her from Saigon to Hollywood and into "The Joy Luck Club" and "The Sympathizer." In limited release, A24-adjacent horror continues to find its audience, with Kane Parsons' liminal-horror feature "Backrooms" expanding to a longer cut, "Backrooms, Everything Must Go," with sixteen extra minutes of footage added this weekend, per IndieWire. The newsroom shelves are not thin.

What these parallel releases have in common, more than the boxes they sit in, is a refusal to assume that the platform decides the audience. Blades tours. Kieu Chinh competes in Vietnam rather than Hollywood. Parsons goes wide on word-of-mouth after a feature run. Muse, like each of them, depends on a room.

Where the second wind comes from

The week ahead is not really about whether Supergirl can recover. It is about the post-debut reset. The film now has to face a marketplace where Pixar's "Toy Story 5" has family audiences booked solid through the holiday, where "Michael" has a built-in nostalgia audience of its own, and where Illumination's Minions, in their seventh feature outing, are the closest thing the industry has to a recession-proof release. Variety's box office reporter framed the weekend plainly: theatrical owners are preparing for more Minion mayhem. Inside that frame, Supergirl is no longer the lead story. It is a holdover in someone else's week.

For Muse, the calculus is gentler. Festival main stages do not penalise second-week slumps. They book on reputation and on the strength of the preceding summer. The harder test is whether the new material survives the contact with a crowd that came to hear "Starlight." The week ahead, in both cases, is the same test, asked with very different clocks. One runs on a four-day weekend. The other runs on a thirty-year run.

Sources

• [2026-06-30T19:19] Variety, "Box Office: 'Minions & Monsters' Aims for $80 Million Over July 4th Holiday Weekend, 'Supergirl' Faces 60% Drop", https://variety.com/2026/film/box-office/minions-monsters-supergirl-july-4th-box-office-1236100000/
• [2026-06-29T23:05] Variety, "LISTEN: Box Office: 'Supergirl' Stumbles, 'Toy Story 5' Flexes and 'Michael' Hits a Milestone; Why Comcast is Splitting NBCUniversal and Sky From Cable", https://variety.com/podcasts/daily-variety/
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergirl_(2026_film)
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_(band)
• [2026-06-30T15:56] IndieWire / Telegram, "Go Deeper Into 'Backrooms,' as Kane Parsons' Hit Liminal Horror Adds 16 More Minutes of Footage", https://t.me/indiewire
• [2026-06-30T15:07] The Guardian / Culture, "'I'm not a quitter!' Rubén Blades, the salsa supremo who acted with Jack Nicholson, inspired Bad Bunny and served as Panama's tourism minister", https://theguardian.com/culture/
• [2026-06-30T08:55] Variety, "Kieu Chinh Returns to Vietnam for the First Time in Competition at Danang Film Fest With 'Chrysalis,' Daniel K. Winn's Adaptation of His Memoir", https://variety.com/
• https://t.me/monexus/cluster-199f99c074

Desk note

Monexus frames the week ahead around the two releases the Guardian's entertainment desk flagged, Supergirl and Muse, and uses only those wires for cast, crew, release-window and biographical facts. Where this piece goes further than the wire is in reading both releases as expressions of the same theatrical instinct, and in flagging the parallel theatrical and broadcast alternatives the wires mention only in passing.