I've been doing this long enough to know the difference between a movie that's getting bad reviews and a movie that's getting USED. This week, Supergirl crossed that line.
When a Fox News panel and former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly are suddenly weighing in on a DC movie they almost certainly never bought a ticket for, and much less have watched, the backlash isn't really about the film anymore. It's about something else, and the movie just happens to be in its blast radius.
I already gave you my full review, so I'm not going to re-litigate the film here. I scored it a 7, maybe a 6 if I'm being strict. What I want to talk about is everything happening AROUND it, because that's the part that's bugging me.
Nobody comped my seat. I bought an early IMAX ticket with my own hard-earned money, same as a lot of you.
And here's the part that matters: I've never had a relationship with Warner Bros. to protect. No screenings, no junkets, and zero invites over 23+ years. If I had an angle here, it would be to grab the easy clicks and pile on like everyone else is doing.
So when I tell you the hate has gotten out of hand, understand I've got no reason to carry water for this studio. I'm a lifelong DC reader telling you straight: a lot of this stopped being fair a while ago.
When Megyn Kelly Shows Up, It Stops Being Film Criticism
My colleague Josh Wilding already rounded up the pundit pile-on, and it's worth your time.
The short version: Megyn Kelly called Milly Alcock "loathsome" and took aim at what she labeled the "girlboss era," while Fox News' Jesse Watters chipped in with a swipe at bisexual women. None of that is a review.
And it helps to know where this even started. Supergirl opened right in the middle of Pride Month, and on the press tour reporters kept asking Milly Alcock about Kara's sexuality. She eventually offered that the character would "probably go both ways", and that one red-carpet soundbite is what Watters ran with on The Five, pivoting off a fictional character's love life into a monologue about not trusting bisexual women.
You cannot critique an actress's PERFORMANCE by going after her identity or her politics. That's the giveaway that the conversation left the actual movie behind. Whatever you think of the culture war, and I'm honestly not here for it from either direction, it has nothing to do with whether Kara Zor-El works on screen.
And No, Alcock Hasn't Helped Her Own Cause
I'm not going to pretend the star did herself any favors here, because she didn't, and I said as much in my review.
In her Variety cover story, she waved off critics whose profiles read "Dad of four, Christian" as burner accounts she found "hilarious," and shrugged that if you're "pissing the right kind of people off, you're doing OK."
Add in some clumsy comments about people judging her "simply for existing as a woman," and she handed the outrage machine all the fuel it could ask for. That's a smug, tone-deaf way to talk about the very people you're asking to buy a ticket, and it's fair game to call it out. She fumbled her press tour, full stop.
But here's where I step off the bandwagon. If the story anyone's selling is that audiences simply won't turn out for a strong woman headlining a genre movie, history says that's nonsense. Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman, Sigourney Weaver's Ripley in the Alien films, and Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia all prove otherwise. Strong women have carried this genre for decades, and we showed up every single time.
Actors say and do dumb things. They always have, and they always will. None of it changes whether the movie they're in actually works, and pinning a star's worst press-tour moment on the film itself is just a convenient excuse for people who'd already made up their minds.
Megyn Kelly Compared Her To Rachel Zegler. It Doesn't Hold.
Kelly's actual line was that Alcock is "as loathsome as the girl who played in Snow White." That's Rachel Zegler she's swiping at, and she couldn't even be bothered to name her. Two young actresses, one bucket.
I get why it's tempting. Both are young leads whose movies stumbled while the internet was furious with them. But line up what they actually said and did, and the comparison comes apart fast.
Zegler spent her Snow White tour at arm's length from the movie she was fronting. She said she was "scared" of the original cartoon, recast the classic as something that needed fixing (no prince, no "dreaming about true love"), and floated cutting Prince Charming's scenes. Then she folded in unrelated politics mid-rollout, from "free Palestine" posts to going after Trump, on a Disney family film.
Alcock did none of that. She never knocked Supergirl, never took a shot at the comics, never went near geopolitics. Her whole rap sheet is getting snippy with anonymous trolls and a flip answer about a fictional character's love life. Clumsy? Sure, and I said so. The same thing as souring on your own movie in public? Not even close.
That's what the whole pile-on runs on. Flatten every young actress the internet's mad at into one interchangeable villain, and you never have to reckon with what any of them actually said. It stops being about the work and starts being about having someone to boo.
Real Criticism Exists. This Isn't It.
Let me be clear, because this cuts both ways. Supergirl has real problems, and I said so in my review.
The villain doesn't land. Ruthye grated on me. Plenty of critics knocking the uneven script and the choppy action have a fair point, and the 58% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes didn't come from nowhere.
That's all legitimate. Tear into the screenplay all day long. But there's a canyon between "the script is uneven" and "the lead is loathsome." One's a review. The other's a target.
Notice that even the critics who didn't care for the film almost universally praised Alcock. The knock was the movie around her, not her. The pundits skipped that part entirely.
About That Audience Score
Here's the number nobody quote-tweeting the outrage wants to bring up. As of this writing, Supergirl sits at that 58% with critics but a far warmer 77% with audiences.
In other words, the people who actually paid to sit in the dark with it landed twenty points higher than the people firing off the loudest takes.
My own showing backs that up. Seven of us went, and the spread was all over the map: two loved it, two liked it, one shrugged, one didn't care for it, and one genuinely hated it. That's a normal, mixed, human reaction to a movie. Nobody walked out calling a 25-year-old actress "loathsome."
Why This Actually Matters
When the pile-on outruns the movie, it stops being criticism and starts being a prophecy.
People skip it because the internet told them to, the box office sags, the "flop" headline writes itself, and the studio walks away learning the wrong lesson. Play it safer. Make it smaller. Take fewer risks.
We've all watched that cycle before, and it's the same crowd that swears up and down they want bold comic-book movies who help bury one when it shows up. That's the part that frustrates me as a fan, completely separate from whether you or I liked this particular film.
So no, I'm not telling you to love it. I gave it a 7, not a 10, and I meant the criticisms I made. I'm telling you to actually WATCH it before you torch it, and to notice the moment "criticism" stops being about anything on the screen.
If you've seen it, give me the honest version in the comments: did it earn the hate, or did the hate just need a target this month? And if you're trashing it without a ticket stub, I'd genuinely love to know what you think you're mad at.
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