Supergirl

I review movies the way I shoot them — from behind the camera, asking what every department actually put on the screen. So let's do Supergirl the honest way, department by department. "It flopped" is a box-office story; I care about the filmmaking story. Spoiler: the numbers earned themselves.

For the record, the ledger is brutal. Roughly $67 million worldwide on opening weekend against a $170 million budget — before you count the marketing, which reportedly ran into nine figures of its own. That's the worst opening DC Studios has posted, and less than a third of what Superman pulled a year earlier. A B- CinemaScore and a 57% Tomatometer mean this wasn't a toxic-fandom ambush — the people who paid to be there shrugged too.

Now the fun part — the breakdown.

Cinematography — 7

Here's where I'll defend the movie, because credit goes where it's earned. Shot for shot, this thing is photographed just fine. The framing is clean, the lensing is competent, and there are a handful of genuinely nice compositions — the heat-vision beat everyone screenshots actually pops. My one real gripe is the same one the critics keep circling: it's dark, and not always on purpose. There's "moody dystopia" dark, and there's "we'll fix it in the DI and hope nobody notices" dark. This drifts into the second kind more than a $170M movie should. But the camera department did its job. They're not the reason we're here.

Sound — 6

Serviceable. The mix is clean, the score does what a superhero score contractually must, and nothing pulled me out of the movie through my ears. That's honestly the second-nicest thing I'll say all review. A 6 is "professionals showed up and hit their marks" — not memorable, not embarrassing.

Action / Realism — 5

Dead average, and average is a disappointment at this budget. When you can fly, punch through buildings, and melt steel with your face, "generic" is the one thing your action should never be — and a lot of this is generic. Weightless CG, geography I couldn't always follow, and set pieces that gesture at spectacle without ever making me feel the physics. The VFX are uneven enough that you can see where the reported test-screening trims left teeth marks. When Superman did this a year ago, the punches landed. These float.

Story — 2

And here's the crime scene. Everything above is a competent crew in service of a script that has no idea what it wants to be. The tone lurches. The villain — Krem — is such a non-event that the movie forgets to make you care whether he wins. And the biggest self-own is the writing around the lead: the film keeps telling us who Supergirl is instead of letting us root for her, so by the time the third act wants an emotional payoff, there's no account to withdraw from. A 2 isn't me being cute. A 2 is "the single most expensive department — the words on the page — was the one that failed hardest."

My Take: They Told Their Own Audience to Stay Home

Here's where I put my DP hat on and say what the box office is screaming. A Supergirl movie should be the easiest turnout in the building — you've got the whole young-female audience sitting right there, ready to be won. Instead, this film went out of its way to lose them, and the press tour lit the fuse.

I watched the interviews. They were rough — a lead spending her press run picking fights and lecturing whole chunks of the audience about what's wrong with them. When you spend the weeks before release scolding the people whose ticket money you need, don't act shocked when they take the hint. That's not "brave." That's marketing malpractice.

But the self-own that really got me, as somebody who's spent his career behind a camera watching what actually pulls people into a theater: proudly announcing there's no romance. Say what you want, but romance sells — the emotional hook, the will-they-won't-they, the relationship stakes. That's a huge part of what brings a female audience out on opening night, and I've seen it fill seats firsthand. You had a lever built for exactly the crowd you were trying to reach, and you not only skipped it, you bragged about skipping it.

Look at who showed up: 59% male, two-thirds over 25, older men the single biggest group — and the young women this movie was supposedly made for came in at a measly 15%, most of them there for the Superman logo, not the film. That's not misogyny. That's a movie that handed women zero reasons to show up and then blamed them for not showing. You've got to give an audience a door to walk through. This one bricked up every entrance and called it a bold choice.

The Part Everyone's Getting Wrong

Don't blame Milly Alcock. She's the best thing in the building. Nearly every critic who torched the film went out of their way to say she's good, and they're right — she plays the hell out of a character the screenplay never bothered to actually write. Her performance is the best thing in the film; her press tour was one of the worst things around it. Two different departments. You can hand your lead a set of Master Primes and a lighting package worth more than a house, but if the script is a first draft in a cape, none of it matters.

The DP's Takeaway

Supergirl is proof that craft can't rescue a story that isn't there. The gap between my 7 for cinematography and my 2 for story is the review — five whole points of "the crew delivered and the script squandered it." It looks like a real movie. It's photographed like a real movie. It just forgot to be one. And $170 million is an awfully expensive way to learn that you can't light your way out of a bad screenplay.

Should you see it? If you're a filmmaker, watch it once as a teardown — there's a lesson in every reel about where the money went and where it didn't. If you're just looking for a good time at the movies, save your ticket. The best performance in it deserved a script that showed up to match her. It didn't.