“Supergirl” proves Hollywood studios still don’t trust women superheroes

Although “Supergirl” is the revamped DC Universe’s second feature-length outing, the film plays more like a B-plot short. Cut a dawdling fight scene here and an interminable escape scene there, and the film would make a delightful in-universe companion to precede next summer’s “Superman” sequel, “Man of Tomorrow.” Trim the whole movie by 80 minutes, and viewers wouldn’t miss any integral story elements or baddie-whooping fights. “Supergirl” is a side quest, an alternate story mode that one could unlock by beating the final boss in a “Superman” video game. Play as Superman’s cousin, Kara Zor-El, while the game’s credits roll, zapping the names of developers with her laser vision as they scroll past to score extra points you can redeem in the SuperShop.

Despite the movie’s theoretical scope, its execution is painfully and frustratingly diminutive. This is partly because, by law of the lore, Supergirl is merely Superman’s little cousin. Kara (Milly Alcock, who shoulders no blame) is just the tertiary family member to Clark Kent’s main character. In the past, the characters’ onscreen appearances were relegated to a forgotten — though remarkably camp — 1984 film and a television series that was too teenybopper for CBS’ primetime lineup, and was shifted over to the CW after one season.

(Warner Bros. Pictures) Milly Alcock in “Supergirl”

If viewers weren’t reminded of this dynamic so frequently throughout the film every time Superman (David Corenswet) calls to check in on his reckless relative, “Supergirl” might have a shot at standing on its own against last summer’s surprisingly watchable blockbuster. Despite its hackneyed space western narrative, the film has good bones. The life of a superhero lends itself well to gallivanting through galaxies, battling space pirates and star bandits. But after a promising first act, the movie’s thrusters lose power, and things quickly begin to fall apart. Director Craig Gillespie is no stranger to turbulent filmmaking, and his “Cruella” commendably made an underserved villain into a fully sketched character, without overrelying on callbacks.

But DC Studios, like all superhero-focused Hollywood studios, is a much different animal than something like Disney. The forces behind these projects, like DC Studios’ co-chairman and co-CEO James Gunn, might talk about how they hope to shake up the stale genre with bold decisions. But rarely are the finished films measurably different or riskier than those that came before.

When “Superman” opened last summer, a lot was riding on the DCU’s first film post-restructuring. Not only did Warner Bros. Discovery lose money by scrapping plans for the original DC Extended Universe, but they reinvested millions tapping Gunn to retool DC movies into something that viewers would actually want to watch. If “Superman” had opened to critical and commercial failure, it would have been a death knell for the modern superhero genre as we know it. (That probably would’ve been a good thing, but I digress.) But shuffling the deck paid off. “Superman” did well, so well that the onus for the DCU’s future fell on “Supergirl.” Sure, Gunn could pull off one good film — anyone can if luck is on their side. But the follow-up would be the true test to see just how viable this new era could really be.

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So, of course, that responsibility went to a woman. For decades, female heroes have unfairly been tasked with measuring up to their male supercolleagues on the silver screen, even though they hold very few key positions in the star superhero lineup. When super women get their own films, it’s usually because they’ve been plucked out of a preexisting pack, like “Black Widow” or “Wonder Woman,” or they’re a villain turned antiheroine, like Harley Quinn in “Birds of Prey.” Rarely do these women ever get the chance to shine on their own without interference from their associates. And while one might call that “universe-building,” it’s no less exasperating when the hundreds of superhero movies led by men dwarf the number starring women.

That imbalance is precisely why “Supergirl” being a flagrant misstep is such a disappointment. With DC’s slate wiped clean, the studio had the chance to swing bigger with a woman-led movie than it ever has before — to make something so confident and audacious that, by the nature of its existence alone, it could be unimpeachable in a sea of superhero sameness. Yet time and again, “Supergirl” falls back on trope-laden character writing, choppily directed action and a plot so thin you can practically see through it to the next DCU excursion, which will, naturally, star a man. It’s a film so uninspired that I’d call it a conspiracy for the studio to relieve itself of women-led films, but history has already proven that narrative.

Most telling is that Alcock has just about everything one could want in a superhero of any gender. She’s beyond charming, armed with the kind of quick wit and well-timed delivery that makes every curse word flying out of her mouth feel like an expletive cast off by a real person, and not a hero that’s written to be a quirky mess. Kara drinks hard and loves light, dulling her traumas with space booze to keep a universe’s distance from Superman, her only remaining family after her home planet, Krypton, was destroyed.

Unlike her cousin, who was sent to Earth from Krypton as a baby and has no direct memories of his parents, Kara was old enough to remember evacuating and making a peaceful life with her parents in Krypton’s Argo City, which was jettisoned from the planet to protect the refugees. But Kryptonite radiation got to Kara’s parents anyway; they sent her to Earth as a teenager, it had a terrible impact — blah, blah, you get the picture. What matters isn’t the backstory, told in a dreadfully overlong flashback in the middle of the film just as the action is picking up, but that Alcock is more than capable of balancing Supergirl’s pain with the character’s bull-in-a-china-shop demeanor.

(DC Studios and Warner Bros. Pictures) Milly Alcock in “Supergirl”

It’s a shame, then, that Alcock hardly gets to explore that range, forced instead to look after Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a young girl who ropes Supergirl into her plan to avenge her father’s death, after he’s killed by the space pirate, Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). Supergirl would rather spend her time intergalactic bar-hopping between 10 different versions of the “Star Wars” cantina. But Krem shot her beloved dog, Krypto, with a tranquilizer dart that will kill him in three days if she doesn’t stop him and retrieve the antidote. And so the adventure begins, taking one assured step forward, right off a cliff.

Supergirl and Ruthye spend the remainder of the film battling bandits on their way to Krem, which would be exciting if they weren’t outwitted and captured every 10 minutes, transitioning into imprisonment sequences that drag on far longer than the fights do. By the end, screenwriter Ana Nogueira tees up some compelling moral dilemmas about the ethics of revenge, but Gillespie’s direction fails to entertain them with the weight they deserve. The ending is slapdash and rushed, somehow missing an emotional target sitting motionless one foot away. And who should arrive to put a button on the story but Superman, welcoming his cousin back to Metropolis with open arms and a flowing cape.

Amid all the (non) action, a key moment between Kara and Ruthye speaks to the growing dissatisfaction at hand. After the pair manages to make it out of another scuffle, Ruthye asks Kara about her family, to which Kara replies that she has none except for her cousin. “They call him Superman,” she says, to which Ruthye fittingly replies, “So you’re Superwoman, then?” My ears perked up for a moment, believing that this would be the kind of radical, self-referential commentary that Gunn staked his DCU on. Instead, the question is met with a punchline, as Kara admits to her hanger-on that she’s known as Supergirl. “Are you considerably younger than he is?” Ruthye asks. “How come he’s a man, and you’re a—.” Ruthye’s subsequent query is cut off by the plot starting up again, and the gendered difference between the two names is never brought up again.

What should have been a unique way for “Supergirl” to remark on the infantilization projected onto so many women superheroes is cast away as a joke so lame it doesn’t even deserve to be finished. Supergirl might be Superman’s direct relative, with powers akin to Clark’s, yet she is merely a girl, whereas he is a man. And while “-boy” and “-girl” are both common gendered suffixes used across comic history, the girls have appeared more frequently in cinematic adaptations. That is, if their adaptations are released at all.

(DC Studios and Warner Bros. Pictures) Milly Alcock as “Supergirl”

Take DC’s famously scrapped “Batgirl” movie, a cancellation so unprecedented that it instantly became one of the most expensive unreleased movies in Hollywood history. At the time that news broke in 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery’s new president, David Zaslav, said he felt the film “simply did not work.” But later reporting suggested that the cancellation was part of a larger cost-cutting measure and that Warner Bros. benefited from writing off the film as a tax loss rather than incurring losses from releasing it. Never mind that DC Studios had, at the time, released several stinkers already. Those films all found an audience despite their unfavorable reception. So it speaks volumes that a woman-led film like “Batgirl” was scrapped, especially when “The Flash” moved forward with its theatrical release the following year, despite the barrage of allegations and criminal charges against its star, Ezra Miller.

One could argue that’s why “Supergirl” plays it so safe. DC Studios has already been through the wringer, and taking too big a swing could prove a major loss just as the DCU is finding its footing. But that’s also exactly why “Supergirl” should be bigger, bawdier and just plain better. In an industry where millions of dollars are traded over lunch, and Warner Bros. Discovery is on the verge of a historic and potentially catastrophic merger, there’s essentially no real consequence in “Supergirl” striking out. Especially because, with this dull, dowdy current iteration dragging its cape into theaters, it already has.

And when films like “Supergirl” disappoint — at the box office or in the eyes of critics and audiences, or both — the low numbers and negative feedback support the false narrative that women-led superhero movies can’t perform as well as their male-focused counterparts. That belief is patently untrue, but more difficult to measure if filmmakers and studios refuse to take a real chance on their caped crusadettes. Even if ambition results in a flop, it’s far more admirable to swing hard and strike out than it is to cower in the proverbial dugout.

As always, I return to a perfect example: 2004’s “Catwoman.” That film was ingeniously enterprising, weird, stylish, sexy, and most importantly, totally singular. Moreover, it was entirely separate from the character’s source comics, with no mention of Batman to be found. Although “Catwoman” didn’t quite recoup its budget in theaters and was largely reviled among audiences and critics, it looks and feels a hell of a lot more thrilling 22 years on than anything DC Studios has cooked up in the time since. Maybe the same will be true for “Supergirl” by 2048. But for a film to become a misunderstood classic, it has to be worth paying any attention to in the first place.