“Supergirl” just can’t flop in peace.
The 2026 film is one of the biggest box office failures of the year and is the DC franchise’s lowest grossing film since Catwoman (2004).
And now it’s the subject of yet another controversy: the apparent use of AI slop during its production.
A behind the scenes video released by Warner Bros shows director Craig Gillespie and actor Jason Momoa looking at concept art for the character Lobo on a laptop. And even viewed from a distance, the design *screams *AI-generated.
There were other clues, like how quickly they customize the character on the fly and a window showing around a dozen other iterations of the image.
There was no way of confirming beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was slop — though, come on — but Warner Bros blundered into a textbook case of the Streisand effect by immediately taking down the video once large media accounts like DiscussingFilm and Culture Crave began sharing clips of it.
And by then, it was too late. The DCU fanbase went into meltdown, and loads of other filmgoers trashed the franchise for stooping so low. T he large film accounts could now get even more attention for saying the video was removed.
To some, this reeked of hypocrisy.
“Love how companies are trying to occupy the superposition of ‘AI is so cool and widely accepted it’s the new norm get used to it,’ and ‘oh fuck they caught us using AI hide it make sure no one knows nobody must be allowed to see our shame,'” one viral post read.
More somberly, another wrote on the r/DC_Cinematic subreddit: “Gotta feel for all the artists watching their career fields diminish and dreams shatter right before their very eyes.”
Not that there’s ever a good time to eschew actual art in favor of AI slop, but the use of AI here feels particularly egregious, since there’s surely no shortage of existing art of the character to go off. Many noted this irony.
“Hey guys let’s use AI to conceptualize what Lobo would look like even though he’s a comic book character that’s existed for 50 f*cking years,” one user fumed.
As far as we can tell, there’s no clear indication that generative AI was used in the final product — and how would you be able to tell anyway, given that superhero movies have been pure slop for years now — but the use of the tech anywhere in the filmmaking process has become an extremely touchy subject. One of the biggest strikes in Hollywood history, a double strike between actors and writers in 2023, was partly over protections against AI.
While many filmmakers and audiences are staunchly opposed to the tech, some of the old guard are beginning to roll over to its advance. Revered director Martin Scorsese shocked the film world, for instance, when he endorsed a startup behind an AI image generational tool for storyboarding, saying he now uses it to plan his own films. More on AI: Neill Blomkamp Is Making It Look Like AI Is the Last Resort for Filmmakers With Failing Careers