Avengers: Doomsday Presales vs Supergirl Box Office: What the Comparison Really Proves — and What It Does Not

A headline circulating this week sounds almost too neat to be true: a Marvel film that has not opened yet has reportedly earned nearly as much in advance sales as a DC film earned in its entire theatrical run. According to tracker reports, worldwide presales for Avengers: Doomsday have climbed to around $125 million, close to the roughly $126 million that Supergirl finished with globally. Doomsday does not reach cinemas until December 18, 2026.

It is a striking comparison, but it needs a careful reading before it is repeated as fact. Presales are not box-office grosses. They are advance payments for tickets not yet used, and they can change with refunds and opening-weekend behaviour. What the numbers do show is a clear gap in momentum between two very different superhero movies: one built as a once-in-a-generation event, and one meant to introduce a new hero to a wider audience.

Start with what is confirmed. Avengers: Doomsday sold a reported $16.5 million in its first 24 hours of limited premium presales, a figure Variety linked to roughly double the first-day result for Deadpool & Wolverine. Disney’s chief financial officer later confirmed that domestic presales had passed $50 million, with more than 70 percent tied to the new Infinity Vision premium format. Everything beyond them should carry the word “reported.”

Tracker reports fill in the climb. Global Box Office reported that the film was the fastest to pass $1 million in presales in both the United Kingdom and Brazil. Other reports put its domestic total above $65 million roughly 50 days before release, and its worldwide presales past $100 million on October 6. The later figure of about $125 million comes from tracker and trade-adjacent reporting, including Forbes-linked coverage cited by other outlets, not from a fresh Disney announcement.

Now consider the other side. Supergirl, directed by Craig Gillespie and starring Milly Alcock as Kara Zor-El, opened on June 26, 2026, to $37.1 million in North America and about $62.6 million worldwide, according to Variety-linked reporting. It finished with about $72.4 million domestically and $54.1 million internationally, for roughly $126.4 million to $126.5 million worldwide, depending on the tracker. Against a reported production budget of $170 million to $186 million, plus substantial marketing costs, it fell far short of profitability. Reports after opening weekend put its break-even point at roughly $315 million worldwide, a target it never approached.

That context changes the meaning of the comparison. Supergirl was not a narrow miss. As the second film in James Gunn’s new DC Universe, following Superman, it needed to prove that a lesser-known hero could carry a solo blockbuster. Instead, it opened soft, dropped sharply in its second weekend, and struggled overseas, where it earned less than half its worldwide total. Critics were generally kinder to Alcock herself than to the film’s commercial fate, and she is still set to return in Man of Tomorrow, but the box-office story was settled long before Doomsday presales entered the conversation.

Doomsday, by contrast, is selling scarcity, scale, and reunion, and premium formats are doing much of the work. If more than 70 percent of confirmed domestic presales are tied to Infinity Vision, as Disney indicated, this is not only about how many people want to see a Marvel film. It is about how many will pay more and book earlier for a format. That helps explain why opening-weekend tracking varies so widely, from roughly $260 million to $300 million domestically in some tracking to $300 million to $400 million in other reports.

So what does this comparison really prove? First, Marvel’s event-movie machine still commands advance demand few franchises can match, especially when a premium format gives fans a reason to buy early. Second, DC Studios still has a discovery problem: audiences did not reject Alcock, but they did not turn out in the numbers needed to launch a new solo hero at blockbuster cost. Third, a presale total is a signal, not a verdict. Doomsday still has to open and hold through the holidays, while Supergirl’s final number is fixed. Whether Marvel turns excitement into a complete run, and whether DC learns from Supergirl, matters more than the headline itself.