Supergirl is a super flop.
The latest superhero flick hit theaters Friday and brought in a paltry $38 million at the boxoffice – millions off the already bleak estimates predicted for the film’s opening weekend. Critics and theatergoers alike had hardly anything nice to say about the big-budget film, and a closer look at the plot and lead actress might shed some light on why.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Stu Burguiere, host of Predictable with Stu, to break down what went wrong.
Alienating Audiences
For those not up to speed on Hollywood’s seemingly never-ending quest to exhaust any and all comic book characters, Supergirl is a DC Universe film that follows Superman’s cousin, Kara Zor-El (a.k.a Supergirl), as she embarks on what the marketers call an “epic, interstellar journey of vengeance and justice.”
But the self-proclaimed epicness does not seem to be translating for critics or audiences who have either panned the film or stayed away altogether.
Not helping matters is that the movie’s lead actress, Milly Alcock, seems to be taking a page from the controversial star of the massive failure that was Disney’s live-action remake of Snow White. Like Rachel Zegler, Alcock has made some curious and polarizing claims about her potential audience.
Alcock, who rose to fame playing Rhaenyra Targaryen in the HBO Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, made headlines earlier this year after she complained to Vanity Fair about how actresses who star in large film and TV franchises are treated by male viewers.
“It definitely made me aware that simply existing as a woman in that space is something that people comment on,” Alcock told Vanity Fair. “We have become very comfortable having this weird ownership of women’s bodies. I can’t really stop them. I can only be myself.”
The backlash was swift, but that didn’t stop Alcock to from doubling down in an interview with Variety a few months later. “I didn’t even say ‘men’ — I said ‘people!’” she claimed. “And they got so angry. I was like, ‘You’re proving my point. You’re proving my point!’”
“I guess women know that this is just how it’s always been, unfortunately,” Alcock added. “And it’s from a lot of people whose profiles have no photo, who are burner accounts. Or someone’s name and then ‘Dad of four, Christian,’ which is hilarious to me. But I mean, whose opinion do you really care about? If you’re pissing the right kind of people off, you’re doing OK.”
‘Woke’ Themes
At the film’s various premieres, Alcock has repeatedly been asked about the sexuality of her character, and she has used the questions to pontificate about how Supergirl “doesn’t live inside the binary of what we think a woman should be.”
Alcock is also proud that the plot “doesn’t center around any sort of love [or] romance.” In a separate interview, she further explained that “what makes this film so beautiful is that it’s not centered around a man [and] it’s not centered around love.” But if Supergirl were to have a love interest, Alcock claimed that “she’d probably go both ways.”
Therein lies at least one of Supergirl’s problems. “She’s got to let us know that her character is queer,” Megyn noted. “And by the way, if you want to make young men love [the movie], pick somebody who is really hot… and is telegraphing to the audience… ‘I don’t hate your guts,’ as opposed to this woman who is like, ‘Thank God it’s not centered on a man, and I bet you she is queer.'”
Burguiere agreed. “Comic book movies and superhero movies have a largely male audience… Forget the word ‘attractive’ when we’re talking about sexuality, just someone who attracts them, right? Someone who is playing into the things that they’re interested in, that is all you have to do,” he explained. “The bar is really, really low for this stuff, but, as we’ve seen with Hollywood over the over the years, they try to go under it at every given opportunity and bash their head into the bar. There is no reason to do that. Make it easy on yourselves.”
Make Better Movies
While The New York Times was busy lamenting how female-led superhero movies have been “rejected almost uniformly over the past five years or so, perhaps reflecting a resurgent misogyny among the core fan base,” Burguiere said the actual problem for Hollywood is that audiences are making their voices heard with their wallets.
“The left in Hollywood wants this sort of God-given right to be able to churn out crappy superhero movies and collect hundreds of millions of dollars at a whim,” he noted. “I’m sorry… as of this moment, it is not legally required for me to see the slop that you are just churning out year after year after year.”
He believes we are coming out of a decade-and-a-half-long run where the studios thought they “could basically put a cape on anything and just collect nine figures,” but those days have passed and Supergirl stands no chance at recouping the $170 million-plus it cost to make – let alone market.
“As much as I want it to be solely about how annoying [Alcock] is and how she is going out there and saying all these things, I do think a big part of it is… we are a merit-based society at some level and it is hard for us to shake that,” Burguiere posited. “I think the left really wants us to shake it… The left doesn’t believe in merit. They believe that you should go see this movie because she is a woman, right? But that is not how people make decisions about their entertainment.”
In Burguiere’s view, “there are movies where women absolutely kick ass and are great”; there are projects with “some woke stuff” surrounding them that are good enough to still appeal to a wide audience (he cited Wicked as one such example); and then there are films like Supergirl that end up being “an absolute catastrophe” simply because they are bad.
“You can overcome these things if you put out a good product, but, a lot of times, it’s an excuse,” he noted. “Like, we have this really crappy movie with a really crappy script with an actress that people don’t really like – and it’s failed – so how do we blame the audience for that? We’re not going to take any responsibility ourselves. Let’s blame the average people.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Burguiere by tuning in to episode 1,349 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.