Traumatized Young Woman?

We wait an hour and a half for Supergirl to put on her Supergirl costume in Supergirl, a movie about Supergirl. When she finally, reluctantly, dons the miniskirt, the thigh-high boots, and the iconic jersey with the “S” on it, the first words she utters, to the film’s unappealing main villain, is “I’m the bitch whose dog you hurt.” That sums up the grim-dark tonedeafness of one of the year’s most disappointing films.

When I pointed this out in a snarky post on my Facebook feed, someone commented that their 16-year-old daughter loved Supergirl and that maybe I wasn’t the target audience. But I’m exactly the target audience for Supergirl. I’ve been following the exploits of this character, in all her iterations, for decades. I saw the previous Supergirl movie in the theater, in 1984, and watched at least the first two seasons of the recent CW Supergirl TV show until it went the way of all CW shows and became impossibly stupid and overplotted. I loved Supergirl in Justice League: Unlimited. This is a character I know as well as my wife knows Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice. And the new movie whiffs so hard because it misses what people like about the Supergirl character in the first place.

The new Supergirl movie is based on a critically-acclaimed graphic novel from 2021 called Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which went outside the typical DC mythos to place Kara Zor-El, the other survivor of Krypton, in the middle of an interstellar revenge plotline. It’s a beautifully illustrated and highly imaginative literary work that comes at the Supergirl character almost from the side. But it’s not an easy story to translate into film, and the film botches it entirely, creating a gross story about child sex trafficking and turning Supergirl into an alcoholic trauma survivor who’s living an a Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff universe. The 2026 Supergirl is a lot of things, most of them bad, but it’s not fun, and it’s not sexy.

And I hate to say it, but this is the thing that audiences actually like about superheroines. They need to be fun, and they need to be sexy. Patty Jenkins’s 2017 Wonder Woman movie had its flaws – most notably setting the action during World War I when Wonder Woman is quite specifically a World War II character – but it was fun, and Gal Gadot had the requisite amount of sex appeal to play the most iconic female hero in American pop culture. The 1984 Supergirl movie was pop trash, but Helen Slater was a wide-eyed, innocent, gorgeous Supergirl who could be a crush object for straight men, gay men, straight girls, and gay girls, and every iteration on the spectrum. Milly Alcock is actually quite a good actor, and does her best with the deeply flawed material that her Supergirl gives her, but the movie goes out of its way to make her as unappealing as possible. She’s the bitch whose dog you hurt.

I understand this is 2026 and we no longer make heroines for the male gaze, or even for the male gays. But there’s still a lane for heroines who are tough, self-confident ass-kickers and don’t need a man, but still have actual appeal to men. Wonder Woman needs no man, but she still loves men, and men still love her. The world is waiting for the return of that sexy librarian archetype who can also twirl into a Spandex-wearing ball-buster. Our superheroines can be complex, they can have trauma, they can be directly critical of the world of men. But they have to at least meet us halfway. The last Superman movie had its flaws, but it was fun. So why isn’t Supergirl fun? Girls just want to have fun.

The first studio that dares make a superheroine movie where the heroine (or heroines) are interesting, complex, and intelligent, but also have PG-13 fun being heroes and look great while doing it will have a big hit on its hands. I’ll be first in line on opening day. Because I’m the target audience.