It is worth pausing, just for a moment, to remember that Superman flew alone on cinema screens for nearly four decades before he ever shared the frame with Batman — a fact that feels almost hallucinatory now, in an era when every caped figure arrives trailing a constellation of lore, spin-offs, and mid-credits promises. Since Iron Man rattled into life in 2008, superhero cinema has been constructed like an enormous cosmic pinball table, where gods, aliens, magic rocks, and talking raccoons all careen off one another in a single, interlocking machine. Audiences, for a long time, seemed content to let the machine run. That contentment, however, appears to be fraying at the seams.

Milly Alcock's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow opened last weekend to a mere $38 million in North America and roughly $68 million worldwide — sobering figures for a production that reportedly cost around $170 million before a single poster was printed or a single trailer was streamed. The result has been widely read as a crisis of confidence in James Gunn's newly rebuilt DC Universe, which is only two films old. Yet the more searching question is whether Supergirl's stumble reveals a fault line that runs beneath the entire genre, not just one studio's blueprint. The Marvel Cinematic Universe taught audiences a particular kind of patience: minor characters mattered, because they were stepping stones toward something colossal, a team-up, a revelation, a link in a chain of carefully engineered intrigue.

That logic held for years, but it depends entirely on momentum, and momentum, once lost, is extraordinarily difficult to recover.