The major trades have weighed in on Supergirl, and the reviews are rough, with Variety delivering an outright evisceration that lands right on something our insiders told us back in December.
Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline all came down on the negative side, feeding into the film’s Rotten Tomatoes score. But it’s Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman who swung hardest and aimed straight at the script.
This is part of our ongoing coverage of James Gunn's Superman sequel. Full details in our Man of Tomorrow guide.
Variety Calls It “A Punk Crock”
Gleiberman’s review is brutal.
He frames the entire movie as a film that thinks it’s “punk rock” but is really “a punk crock,” knocking a Kara Zor-El written as a one-note “interplanetary drunk in a Blondie T-shirt” and a villain, Krem, he dismisses as “an overly derivative ‘Mad Max’ reject.”
His core complaint is that the film simply has no story: “Kill Krem! Save the dog! Those are the motivations driving the entire not-even-interesting-enough-to-be-convoluted plot,” which is “why the movie is full of action yet numbingly flat.”
He even expressed shock that I, Tonya and Cruella director Craig Gillespie “could churn out a piece of product this generic.”
The Script Criticism Hits A Nerve
Here’s where it gets pointed for DC.
Gleiberman builds his takedown around a specific irony: James Gunn’s whole stated philosophy for avoiding superhero fatigue was that DC wouldn’t start production on a movie until the script was rock-solid, because lousy scripts were what doomed the overkill era.
As Gleiberman puts it: “Gunn was right to want to take the comic-book genre back to well-structured screenwriting basics. So what has he done in his second DC outing? He’s given us a comic-book movie with the worst script I can remember.”
That criticism should sound familiar to Cosmic Book News readers.
Back in December, our insiders told us that Gunn had quietly abandoned that finished-script approach and reverted to the so-called “Marvel method” — working from a broad outline, previsualizing the big VFX moments and “wow” beats first, then layering in character work and leaning on his writing team’s humor to paper over the weak spots.
In other words, months before any critic saw the movie, we reported that the script-first director had stopped putting the script first.
Variety‘s review now independently describes that exact failure, a director who preached well-structured screenwriting, then delivered a movie its critics say has no structured screenplay to speak of.
It also lines up with our reporting that Gunn has had to pivot the DCU’s focus toward the broader Super family.
THR And Deadline Pile On
It wasn’t just Variety.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney found the film’s script written “with little distinction,” praising only the Krypton flashbacks for having a genuine emotional pulse while wishing the filmmakers had gone the full origin-story route.
Deadline‘s Pete Hammond was somewhat kinder but still landed negative, writing that “the special effects and relentlessly dark tone often get in the way of making this group rock,” with Alcock playing Kara as “a bit too quirky.”
Notably, all three reviews single out the same bright spots — Alcock herself, the Kryptonian-language flashbacks, and Jason Momoa’s scene-stealing Lobo (something our insiders also said) — while agreeing the movie around them doesn’t work.
The Box Office Number Keeps Falling
The timing isn’t helping the projections, either.
Following the wave of reviews, Box Office Theory revised its low-end estimate down again, now to $34 million, another step down in a tracking slide that’s been heading one direction for weeks.
With Supergirl already set to lose its opening weekend to Toy Story 5, a mixed-to-negative critical consensus is the last thing the film needed heading into June 26.
Supergirl opens June 26.
