Girls Just Want to Have a Smash-Hit Superheroine
Why ‘Supergirl’ Is Meh—and 'Disclosure,’ ‘Backrooms,’ and ‘Obsession’ Are Wildly Successful
Milly Alcock as Supergirl. Art courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery
I really wanted Supergirl to do well at the box office. Instead, it’s projected to lose $100 million. And we have a summer that so far is dominated by films from 20-something and senior citizen men. I’m not knocking any of three male filmmakers and their smash-hit films: Curry Barker with Obsession, Kane Parson with Backrooms, and the venerable Steven Spielberg with Disclosure Day.
There’s a bit of a reverb going on between three of them. As a recent podcast from The New York Times’ critics at large noted, the young turks’ horror films seem to have learned from Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws, which is considered to be the first modern summer blockbuster.
I applaud all of them. But as woman who has actively supported female creatives, and won some film contests to boot, I was hoping that we’d chalk up a summertime “win” for movies written by and starring females. The odds are stacked against women, as literary manager Raquelle David wrote in a recent story. She makes the case (with a series of statistics) that if Curry Barker was a woman his film never would have been given the breaks that made it so wildly successful.
Needless to say, Supergirl wasn’t the product of a scrappy young filmmaker. Based on beloved DC comic books, it had a hefty budget, $170 million. It has a female writer, Ana Nogueira, and lead actress, Milly Alcock. It’s directed by Craig Gillespie (whose credits include Lars and the Real Girl and I, Tonya). And one of its producers is DC Comics mastermind James Gunn.
What are the critics saying? Referring to the villain Krem and Krypto the dog, a Variety review summed up Supergirl this way: “Kill Krem! Save the dog! Those are the motivations driving the entire not-even-interesting-enough-to-be-convoluted plot of Supergirl. Maybe that’s why the movie is full of action yet numbingly flat.”
Another review of the film, from Deadline, noted: “There’s a bit of True Grit, a bit of Star Wars, a dash of Hellraiser, a whole lot of Mad Max, but Superman? Not so much. It feels like it takes forever before this hero dons her cape and demonstrates her full powers.”
Those are probably some of the reasons why it didn’t follow in the highly successful footsteps of female-focused fantasies like Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which opened almost exactly three years ago, or the two Wicked films, which debuted in 2024 and 2025.
But the situation is more nuanced than that. Several factors are at play. As a Variety article explains: “The culture war is a contributing factor in the poor performance of female-led superhero films, with hordes of online misogynists lashing out at them sight unseen ... Who can forget the manly meltdown over women-only screenings of Wonder Woman? — to big box office returns, and the female-focused Barbie shattered records, grossing $1.4 billion worldwide. That’s because those films were made with care and consideration, unlike Supergirl or other recent movies centering women superheroes.”
In the not-carefully-made category there is Wonder Woman 1984, The New Mutants, Eternals, The Marvels, Madame Web, and last year’s Red Sonja, according to the article.
On top of that: audiences are facing superhero fatigue these days, which is why originals like Obsession and Backrooms have done so well, the article says.
Spielberg’s Disclosure falls into that original category, too. Emily Blunt shines so brightly as a very human character despite the special gifts she’s been given by mysterious alien powers. She earns her courage in hard and authentic ways—such as a hair-raising action sequence that’s pure Alfred Hitchcock.
Spielberg borrowed from Hitchcock just as the YouTube wunderkinds borrowed from Spielberg in making Obsession and Backrooms.
One of the many splendid things about storytelling in any format, including movies, is they cater to many different types of people and story appetites. Someone who likes Disclosure Day isn’t necessarily going to like Wonder Woman. I’m sure Supergirl went through all sorts of testing at Warner Bros. Discovery. And yet, filmmakers and studios can misread how their works will be perceived—no matter the genre or the predominant gender in the limelight.
Supergirl scribe Nogueira and DC producer Gunn are apparently working together on a new Wonder Woman project. Let’s hope they have a better go at it next time.
Also on My Radar
No, that’s not a close-up of a sequinned gown. It’s a Milky Way image from the Euclid telescope (with color added). Photo courtesy of ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA
The Most Detailed Image Yet of the Milky Way’s Center—Wired
New ‘Blair Witch Project’ Movie Sets Fall 2027 Release—Deadline
‘The Everlasting’ Series Adaptation in the Works at Netflix—Variety
The New ‘Odyssey’ Movie Is Sparking a Right-Wing Backlash—Wired
AI Is Making Everything More Expensive—SuperJoost