2500 words on Supergirl.

I read what we all read. It was terrible. It was horrible. She was bad. The director was bad. They blew the ending. NO ONE SHOULD GO SEE IT. A whole town and ecosystem that roots for failure over the weekend as prognosticators ratchet down the numbers. “Oh it was tracking to be 50 million and now we are lowering the estimate to 40, no 38 million.” It felt like the internet equivalent of this gag…

Running all over to proclaim how terrible this movie was.

And with that, I took my AMC A-List self to the movies on Wednesday to see it.

Was there a MacGuffin device that was needed to save the universe/destroy the universe/reset the universe? Nope.

Was there a fight scene with so many things going on that you had a hard time understanding who people were in it and lost the thread of what it was about, other than getting Superman/Flash/Spider-Man/Thor in the same shot? Nope.

Was there an antagonist that was a mélange of all the other villains we’ve ever had to watch battle the hero(es) like Darksied/Steppenwolf/Thanos/That One Guy That Laughed At His own Jokes too much? YEAH. We did get that.

Here’s a picture of that bad guy from the movie, next to the bad guy from the comic it was adapted from.

Now I know there is a great tradition of bad guys having metal in their faces and also vaguely Russian accents even if they have never been to earth and know about Russia. I get it. Why do all that work when you don’t have to, is a writing rule always worth considering.

But if that was a problem, how could we have fixed it? Or should we? Or should we just say everything’s terrible and throw the whole movie away like we did with the Flash movie, which was objectively terrible.

Did we have a believable and fun performance from our lead? YUP.

Did we have a clean story that made sense? YUP.

Were there liberties taken with the ending compared to the one in the graphic novel? YUP.

And here’s where we have another good old fashioned internet argument. And what I mean is one where you state your case, and then the other side says that your case is an embarrassment to all of humanity and you should be ashamed that you even exist. And then you do the same about the other person’s argument. I know you already get this, but I just can’t resist a little role play.

“I think that it’s super cool that in this country we drive on the right side of the road.”

“You are so embarrassing in saying out loud the dumbest thing in the universe that I am ashamed for you. How do you wake up and feed and dress yourself every day? Or do you? Are you writing this from your parent’s basement where you stay in bed all day? You should delete your account now and go back to your job of not having a job.”

It appears that the director of the movie didn’t adapt the graphic novel, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow,” exactly. This is either the worst thing in the world, see above two line play dialogue, or you know, the director and the writer and the producer has a way they wanted to adapt the book. Like how, I don’t know, The Cohen Brothers adapted the book, “The Odyssey,” into “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” And just like they did, this movie wasn’t called, “Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow, except for the look of it production wise, and the ending also by the way.” I think they just called the movie, “Supergirl.” Hopefully so people would know they weren’t going in to watch a page by page adaptation of a graphic novel. When’s the last time that happened anyway? Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen?” I’m not sure.

I’m not going to spoil the ending because I don’t want to further ruin a movie that so many people have already ruined for everyone. What I’d like to do is tell you why I liked it. Then tell you why I think it got such a huge bunch of hate. Then I’m going to round off this by sharing five other movies that got roasted and destroyed and didn’t deserve it.

I liked Milly’s acting. I thought she was great at playing a 23 year old who has suffered a great deal and was in search of meaning. I liked that at a crucial moment the idea of what is good and does good have to also be kind came up. I liked that the character grappled with this. It wasn’t an A plus B equals C immediately. It was like a seed got planted. And then we got to see some well timed flashback to where that idea came from and how it is in Supergirl’s mind and why it keeps sticking there, even when she’s trying to run away from it. And I liked the ending. I did. I also liked the ending of the comic book that was different. I liked them both.

How can you possibly like both of these endings? Because one is a comic book and one is a movie. And I can imagine how the comic book ending got made – Tom King had an idea for the story he wanted to tell, and he sent it to the Editors, maybe there was a conversation about things, and in the end, Tom King got to write the ending he wanted.

“AH HA!” you say. “This is going to be about how show business and of course, my super-villain Gary Marsh former head of Disney Channel ruin everything! Got you, sucker.”

Nope. I imagine the way the ending of the movie got worked out was this. A conversation between the writer and the James Gunn and maybe the director if the director was on board at this point.

“Should we do this ending? Or should we go this other way that might be surprising and it might change how people think about Supergirl. We’re not sure.” And the writer has said that per James Gunn, the end of the movie was always going to be the ending we saw. What I hope is that in discussing the theme of the movie and also where they may or may not want to take Supergirl in the future for other things, they decided, “You know what? IF we go this other way it will still work with what we’re doing and it will also do something that a lot of Marvel and DC and Star Wars and any other franchise hasn’t done in awhile:

Have their characters be greatly changed by the experience we just watched.

Yeah. Seems simple as hell. But really think about it. After that one Spider-Man movie with the word “Home” in the title the world knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man. But was he different? Besides panicked because his secret identity was out? Once Captain American and Robert Downey Jr. fought the Marvel Civil War to end Marvel Slavery (not sure about this one, hard to remember the specifics, which I think is my point here), were either of them different? Changed greatly? Or had everything sort of drifted into this television space of, “Whew, glad we dodged that plot bullet. Let’s hug and go on the same as we always are so if anyone watches these out of order, it will be okay.”

So when Grogru and Pedro fly off, at the end of that one that came out recently, they’re all good. They had a well filmed adventure that was aligned with an arc that got them to the end, but they were cool guys. They could have easily grabbed a beer and a burger and sat down with Dom Toretta and Michele Rodriguez at the end of a Fast movie and said, “Family, right?” Then Dom would have tried to stand so it didn’t look like Pedro was taller than he was. And Michele would say, “Dude, it’s okay to take off the helmet. We get that you’re rarely on set, but jeez, they’re paying you to show up,”

Supergirl changed. Supergirl at the end was different than Supergirl at the start. Here’s a list of other movies where the character really changed and we loved it.

Han Solo at the end of A New Hope.

Al Pacino at the end of The Godfather.

Superman at the end of Superman: The Movie (Christopher Reeves version)

Holly Hunter at the end of Broadcast News

Meryl Streep in almost all Meryl Streep movies.

I could go on. You get it. When we spend time with these characters and they are changed by the end of the movie we feel like it was time well spent. If we get to the end, and think, “Hmm. If I read the Wikipedia on this one, I could have spent that 2 hours reading the book I’m reading right now, “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse And What To Do About It.”

I think that’s why Horror continues to dominate at the box office. At the end people most certainly have changed. They’ve been through a traumatic horrifying experience. You rarely see the end of a horror movie where everyone says, “Wow. That wasn’t a mummy after all. Whew. Now I can get back to my life as a camp counselor/babysitter/news anchor. “Disclosure Day.” Not a horror movie but at the end, the change in our protagonist was palpable and leapt off the screen.

And that was that. I liked the movie Supergirl. It was good.

Onto the next part It got a bunch of hate because of three things:

1) The internet, for some reason, not sure why, I don’t think it has any corresponding equivalent in the real world, we should look into why this is only an internet thing, hates female superheroes.

2) Once a bandwagon starts it’s so fun being on one. It has speed, there are other people on it, sometimes you get to put your hands up and go, “Wheeee! This is fun hating on things!”

3) We live in a time when hate is stronger than love. Know how to fix it? Love people and love ideas. When something isn’t great, don’t hate. Just know a lot of people put a lot of time and effort into it. They were trying for the most part. Also, don’t let hate consume you. Unless it’s about billionaires ruining things, or as I may have mentioned, Gary Marsh.

Was it the movie of the year? No. For me, that’s currently “Obsession.” Or 2023’s TV Show “Andor.” Was “Andor,” a movie in 2026? Nope. My column, my rules. But I liked it.

The final reason I liked it was because I have loved comic books my whole life as all of you smart and loyal readers know. And I’m always looking to walk into a theater and be swept away into a world that captures me like the world of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” did all those years ago. I’m not saying Supergirl is Raiders, but I am saying that it did feel like I was inside a comic book story, and the world around that comic book story receded into the background and I was inside it. That’s everything.

Finally, we’re at the last part. The list of movies I saw that no one else liked. Let’s call that list,

“I’m not marching on the wrong foot, the rest of the band is!”

1) John Carter – FUN. Saw a preview screening before all the vitriol started. Neat to see on screen a version of the book that inspired George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry, among others.

2) Supergirl - See Above Column.

3) Funny Bones – Oliver Platt plays a failed comedian, who is the son of a famous comedian, played by Jerry Lewis. Wild movie. All over the place in a fun way.

4) Into The Night – Jeff Goldblum gets caught up in Michelle Pfeiffer’s wild life. it’s the 1980s which had a lot of male yuppies in peril movies. I liked this one a lot. They were both great in it. And Carl Perkins and David Bowie played assassins.

5) Grease 2 – I think I’ve written about how great this movie is and how it played with gender roles in a fun way. Music was great. And guess what? Another Michelle Pfeiffer joint. Did I just say Pfeiffer is the greatest American Actor of all time? Maybe I did. If you don’t agree, I’m embarrassed for you and ashamed you are still on earth.

There you go. 2500 words on Supergirl. Go see it. It’s not gonna save the movie from the somewhat predetermined ruination but it’s fun and Milly’s great in it.

And if you do go, maybe don’t go to keep score. Don’t go as the internet’s representative, there to verify that the hate was justified. Go the way you went when you were a kid and didn’t know what Cinemascore was, or tracking, or the difference between a flop and a bomb and a disappointment. Go as the person who still secretly hopes a movie can yank you out of your life for two hours and drop you back a little different.

We talk a lot about “stakes” in these stories like it’s always the fate of the universe. But most days, the stakes are smaller and weirder: Can this thing make me feel something? Can it make me care about a stranger in a cape? Can it remind me that being changed by an experience is actually the whole point?

Can someone get through something and out the other side, changed for the better? Or the worse? Supergirl did. Her and the movie did that for me.

Not perfectly. Not for everyone. But enough that I walked out of the theater feeling like I’d just lived inside a comic book for a while, and the world outside the lobby doors was a little less loud, a little less certain, and a little more open to surprise.

In a world where hate gets better box office than love, I’ll take that win.

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