Ssshh... don't tell boys it's about Supergirl! Andrea Romano confirms sexism in Superman/Batman Apocalypse title change.

Confirming what I've long suspected, Andrea Romano commented to Newsarama's Jill Pantozzi that the reason the recently-released Superman/Batman Apocalypse was not called 'Supergirl' was that Warner marketing put the kibosh on female-driven projects at DCAU after the comparability poor sales of the Wonder Woman DVD.

“I think the main reason why they didn’t call this piece Supergirl is because for some reason theWonder Woman home video that we made, which was very, very good and filled with (fe)male* characters, didn’t sell well,” she told us. “And so marketing people said, female titled pieces don’t sell well. So this is a female piece, it’s got a very strong feminine character in it but they called it Superman/Batman: Apocalypse just to get people to come into the video stores and buy them.”

So yes, Warner's DCAU marketing department is so frightened of marketing to girls and/or getting boys to see a movie primarily about a female super hero, that they removed any trace of Supergirl both from the film's title and the film's trailer. The sad thing is, aside from the principal of this kind of thinking, is that Wonder Woman (still the best film in this ongoing series) was not a poor seller in the long run, it just didn't sell quite as many copies quite as quickly as Batman: Gotham Knights or Superman: Doomsday. So newsflash young women of the world: not only does Disney no longer market to you, but the DC Animated Universe is no longer allowed to make movies that are marketed to you. And if they have the nerve to make a female-driven picture, then they have to disguise it as a testosterone-filled sausage-fest. Just fantastic.

Scott Mendelson

* Romano said that Wonder Woman was 'filled with many male characters', which was likely a typo. I presume she meant 'female characters', as there were only a few men in Wonder Woman.