Mandalorian and Grogu built a movie on a main character whose face we couldn’t see. Minions & Monsters built its movie on main characters who speak a language we don’t understand. Will it suffer a similar fate?
I find it funny when the trades try to cover for a movie bombing. According to them, the reason Minions made 60 million dollars compared to 120 million for the last sequel is that July 4th landed on a Saturday. Which meant the weekend played traditionally, versus when it lands on, say, a Thursday, and then it gets more people in on the non-weekend days.
Oh, and then there’s the World Cup excuse. You know, cause the World Cup fans are entire families. So they’re more focused on that than movies. Hmm, strange how the World Cup excuse didn’t apply to Toy Story 5’s record-breaking opening.
Uh, here’s an alternative explanation. Just throwing it out there. DON’T RELEASE YOUR ANIMATION MOVIE TWO WEEKENDS AFTER THE PREMIER ANIMATED FRANCHISE IN TOWN!
You know. Maybe that’s a reason also?
Now that the Obsession obsession has finally cooled down, the second biggest box office story of the year has come to the forefront. And that’s the quick merciless death of Supergirl. The movie dropped 80% in its second weekend, which is almost impossible, just based on the fact that, when you have that many theaters, sometimes people accidentally buy tickets to the wrong movie.
One of the things that’s always thrown me about Hollywood is how the town will decide early on that a movie is toast and every single person gets on that narrative train, making it very hard for the movie to overcome that negative buzz.
That’s how I would frame the failure of this movie. Right from the beginning, people were against it. And it strangely started when Millie Alcock signed on to play the lead, hot off the buzz she was getting from Game of Thrones.
I’m starting to think that all you need to build buzz about yourself in this business is a really bright blond wig. Maybe I should get a bright blond wig. Wear it around the farmer’s market at the Grove a few hours a day. Speak in Old English. Use a lot of “ye’s” and “thou’s.” Who knows what might come of it.
A lot of people point to Millie Alcock’s interviews as a problem. That’s when a lot of people turned on her. Her most famous quote was this response: “It definitely made me aware that simply existing as a woman in that space is something that people comment on. We have become very comfortable having this weird ownership of women’s bodies. I can’t really stop them. I can only be myself.”
When she was asked about that comment a year later, she doubled down. “I didn’t even say ‘men’ — I said ‘people!’ And they got so angry. I was like, ‘You’re proving my point. You’re proving my point!’”
There were also some woke criticisms that came from comments claiming Supergirl doesn’t live “inside the binary of what a woman should be.”
And it’s definitely Millie Alcock’s fault for saying these things. But not for the reasons you’d think.
Reporters asked her questions that they hoped would get these very responses because reporters know that these responses go viral. So they asked her in that first response what she thought about toxic fandom in regards to House of the Dragon. And they asked her, in that second response, if Supergirl is a good role model for queer people.
In other words, they were baiting her. And she took the bait. And she only took it twice but that’s all that was needed. People turned on her hard after that.
This is part of being an actor. You have to know that the media is not on your side. They are only there to get things from you that help them. And so you sometimes have to swallow what you want to say and instead say what’s best for your project and your career.
There’s a reason that nobody can quote a single thing that Leonardo DiCaprio has ever said in an interview. Because he knows the game the media is playing so he’s deliberately boring. He gives them nothing to print.
The other option is to be like Inde Navarette (Nikki in Obsession). She is the most beloved actress in town right now and she would never ever make a mistake like Millie Alcock made. She was recently cornered by the press asking her about the rumors she might play the lead in Michael B. Jordan’s movie adaptation of the popular book franchise, The Fourth Wing.
This was her response: “I have seen this because I said that I’m a really big fan of Fourth Wing and I would love to play Violet. But I mean, at the end of the day, I really want the studio to find who they want to find and what everybody thinks is like the perfect actress. But if that happens to me, that would be phenomenal.”
You don’t get the sense that Millie Alcock could respond like that. And she’s paying the price for it.
Look. Supergirl was a miscalculation on a giant level. The biggest miscalculation was betting on a third-tier superhero at the tail end of the movie superhero era. People aren’t seeing superhero movies at nearly the same clip anymore. The only ones that do well now are the big dogs. So, if you want to identify the core issue that caused this movie’s failure, that was it.
Millie Alcock’s attitude only exacerbated that problem. And it’s something I believe Gunn was aware of. So he made sure that Supergirl was going to have a big “save the cat” moment early on in the movie so that we fell in love with her. The save the cat scene we got? Supergirl is drinking in a bar when a giant alien steals a little girl’s dead father’s sword. Supergirl then goes after the alien to get the sword back for the girl.
What struck me most about that scene was how little I felt afterwards. I did not think, “Wow, I really like this person.” Which is the primary thing that the save the cat scene is designed to do. But I didn’t feel that way and I suspect it was because Supergirl was pissed off the whole time that she had to help this little girl. So it negated the action.
On top of that, reluctant heroes are notoriously difficult to write, since characters who don’t want to do the very thing the story requires them to do create a tricky puzzle for screenwriters. In storytelling, it always works best when the person pushing the story forward wants to achieve the goal.
The best I’ve ever seen the reluctant hero work in a screenplay was Braveheart. William Wallace hated every second of his quest. But he also loved his country more than anything and wanted freedom for his people. So, that helps a lot. When your hero is doing things for others rather than himself. And even though Supergirl is technically doing this to save her dog, she feels like she’s only in this for herself.
I think one of the more interesting subplots of the downfall of superhero movies is the bizarre choice by both Marvel, with Thunderbolts, and DC, with Supergirl, to center their stories around depression.
I’m not saying depression shouldn’t be discussed. I just think it’s a tough fit for a genre built on wish fulfillment and escapism. People go to superhero movies to feel uplifted, not to spend two hours watching superheroes wrestle with the same problems they brought into the theater.
I don’t know. Maybe they thought with Joker’s success that they could bring in a new “depression era” in superhero movies. That everyone was now going to get all jazzed to see depression trilogies. I got news for you, Hollywood. AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN. You want to explore depression, do it with a 15 million dollar film. Not 200 million dollars. Cause these are the results you get.
But the funniest story to come out of Supergirls’s failure is the battle between the “needle drops.” For those who don’t know, I guess because of his Guardians movies, James Gunn has anointed himself the king at being able to drop just the right song at just the right moment into the climactic sequence of the movie, delivering an epic finale.
Because Supergirl had been testing in the 60s (that’s really low) for months before its release, they were looking for every way possible to bring that score up.
Their big solution? The needle-drop moment!
Apparently, there was then a battle between Gunn and Supergirl director Craig Gillespie about what the needle drop song should be. And they went back and forth on it and they had all these meetings and they even tested different needle drops with different audiences.
Dude.
If you’re depending on a needle drop to save your movie, your movie’s dead. It is six feet under. Maybe that’s your needle drop. Billie Eilish’s Six Feet Under.
I think Supergirl just had too many things working against it. It’s too bad because everybody says the comic book the movie is based on is amazing. But not all comic books are meant to be turned into movies. And I think that having an unlikable protagonist combined with a not very likable actress was the nail in the coffin.
