I first noticed it when one critic from a leading trade reviewing Supergirl wrote that audiences had grown tired of girlboss features and that Hollywood should have learned its lesson by now. Really. I read it twice to be sure. Was I looking at a respectable trade publication or had I wandered into some dark, incel-infested corner of Reddit by accident? Because the line could have come from either, and the fact that I couldn’t tell anymore is sort of the whole problem.
Other reviews posted on Rotten Tomatoes also carried with them such MAGA-coded media words like ‘virtue signaling’ and ‘woke’ and it’s worth remembering where this particular dialect came from, because it didn’t fall out of the sky. The ugliness has a fairly precise birthday. In 2016 the Marvel character Mockingbird appeared on a comic cover wearing a t-shirt that read “Ask Me About My Feminist Agenda,” and for that crime the book’s writer, Chelsea Cain, was driven off Twitter by a harassment campaign that included an illustration of the character drawn dead, her costume torn off after a brutal rape, the t-shirt slogan used as a caption. That was the opening shot, and it told you everything about what was coming, because the response to a woman making a small joke about feminism was to fantasize in pictures about her character being raped and killed.
It picked up a name the next year. In July 2017, a handful of women who worked at Marvel went out for milkshakes to honor Flo Steinberg, a beloved industry pioneer who had just died, and posted a smiling group photo. That selfie, of all things, set off a wave of trolling, rape threats, and doxxing, and the movement that crystallized around it got christened Comicsgate. From there it found a target almost every week. A G.I. Joe writer was hounded over a clumsy 9/11 tweet until he lost the gig. Trans creators got misgendered and called mentally ill by the campaign’s ringleaders as a matter of routine. Blacklists circulated, sorting respected professionals into categories like “SJW Vipers,” nearly every name on them a woman, a person of color, or someone left of center.
The complaints were always laundered through the language of quality and sales and merit, but the targets never varied, which is how you knew what it was actually about. And the sales argument was a lie on its own terms. Comics sales were sliding industry-wide in the late 2010s, hitting the traditional white-guy titles every bit as hard, while several of the diverse books these people swore were killing the medium, Ms. Marvel and Squirrel Girl among them, were in fact some of the ones actually selling.
None of this happened in a vacuum, either. It crested at the exact moment a new president was teaching a whole generation that grievance could be a personality and an aggrieved tweet could be a form of governance. Suddenly the things people once knew better than to say in public were getting said in public, loudly, by people who felt newly licensed to say them. Comicsgate was simply the comic book franchise of that larger monster, and it borrowed its entire playbook from Gamergate before it: pick a target, frame the target as the thing ruining everything you love, and let the outrage pay for itself.
Which is where the bumper sticker comes in. Somewhere in here the slogan “go woke, go broke” got minted, and it has been wheeled out ever since as though it were an economic law rather than a wish. It is worth saying plainly that it is both factually wrong and morally bankrupt. Factually, because the box office keeps refusing to cooperate with it. Barbie made over a billion dollars telling a story explicitly about patriarchy. Black Panther and Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel all cleared a billion or came near it. Mad Max: Fury Road handed its own franchise to Furiosa and won six Oscars doing it. The Hunger Games movies, built entirely on a teenage girl, printed money for the better part of a decade.
Hollywood is loaded with films that lean hard into progressive ideals and put women and people of color at the center and do tremendous business, and the studios know it, because studios can read a ledger. So the slogan was never a description of how audiences actually behave. It’s a description of how a particular slice of middle-aged white men wish audiences behaved, and the rest of us are supposed to mistake their wishing for a market trend. And morally it’s worse than merely wrong, because what it actually argues is that the presence of certain kinds of people is inherently bad for business, which is just an old bigotry wearing the costume of market analysis. The engine never shut off after Comicsgate. It kept finding new fuel, and somewhere along the way it stopped living only on YouTube channels named after some flavor of angry guy and started showing up, sanded down and made respectable, in the bylines your parents trust. The grievance got a suit and tie. Now it writes for trades.
By now the thing runs on rails, and it runs the same way every time. It starts months before anyone has bought a ticket, when the videos and the posts begin framing whatever’s coming as the next woke disaster, the next ruined franchise, the next lead who supposedly hates her own fans. By the time the movie actually arrives the audience has been told for half a year that it’s already guilty, so the hostile reaction is locked in before frame one, the review-bombing and the quote-hunting and the rage comments all pre-loaded and waiting.
Then the mainstream press, smelling a story, calls up the actress and asks her how she’s holding up under all the toxic fandom, and she does the only thing a person can do, which is answer honestly that yes, some of the response has been ugly. That answer gets clipped, stripped of its context, and run back through the machine as proof that she’s the aggressor, that she’s anti-men or anti-fan or sneering at the very people who buy the tickets. And then the same outlets that helped manufacture the hostility cover the fallout as if they’d simply found it lying in the road. The actress’s reaction to the attack gets sold as the original attack. Causality erased, and the cycle resets, ready for the next franchise and the next woman, same playbook. The rage was the product all along. It drives clicks, the clicks drive revenue, the revenue buys more outrage, and around it goes.
Which brings me to Supergirl, a movie I walked in hoping for the best on and walked out mostly pleased with, and one I’d like to judge on its own merits before all of that machinery gets a chance to digest it.
Kara Zor-El has spent most of her existence as a footnote to her famous cousin, the junior-varsity Kryptonian, a character writers reached for when they wanted Superman energy without Superman. James Gunn’s rebuilt DC slate finally gives her a movie that wants her to stand on her own. Craig Gillespie directs, Ana Nogueira wrote it, and the lead is Milly Alcock, who you may know as the younger Rhaenyra from House of the Dragon. She’s surrounded by Eve Ridley as a vengeance-bent young alien named Ruthye, Jason Momoa as the bounty hunter Lobo, Matthias Schoenaerts as the villain Krem, and a quick David Corenswet cameo as Superman. The source is Tom King’s comic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and that was the working title too until a marketing person got nervous about the length.
The first real choice the movie makes, and the one I respected most, is that it refuses to write Kara as a female clone of Superman, which is more or less what she’s been across most of her history in print and on film. Gunn has been open that he wanted a tougher, angrier take, and Nogueira’s script honors that. This is not the orphan rocketed to Kansas and raised on casseroles and unconditional love. This Kara was old enough to watch her planet come apart, and she carries that wound into every scene, and the picture is smart enough to let that grief sit at its center instead of resolving it by the second act. It also strands her out in deep space rather than parking her on Earth, with Krypto the dog as a co-pilot the film deploys, shamelessly and effectively, straight at your tear ducts.
Alcock is the reason the whole thing holds together, and she holds it together easily. She came up as the young Rhaenyra on House of the Dragon and she brings real magnetism to Kara, but the choice that makes the performance is that she plays her as a hungover party girl. This is a Supergirl who spends her birthday getting drunk on a red-sun planet because it’s the only place her body will let her, who’s reckless and prickly and not especially interested in being anybody’s role model. It’s a genuinely fun, lived-in performance, and predictably it’s also the thing that has the incel crowd the most worked up, because their Supergirl was supposed to be a virginal good girl, a wholesome cardboard cousin to Superman, and this one drinks and stumbles and makes bad calls. She’s allowed to be a person with appetites and flaws, and to a certain kind of fan that’s not characterization, it’s a provocation. Alcock leans into it, and the movie is better and braver for letting her.
The movie gets stolen out from under her anyway, and the thief is Jason Momoa. After all those years stuck being a fairly damp Aquaman, he’s found the DC role he was apparently born to play, an intergalactic bounty hunter named Lobo who is equal parts menace and lunatic and is clearly having the best time of anyone on set. Lobo wasn’t in the Woman of Tomorrow comic at all, which makes his presence here feel a little bolted-on if you know the source, and there’s at least one moment where the movie lets him rescue and then belittle its own heroine that sits worse than the filmmakers seem to realize. But taken on his own, he’s a blast, and the picture wakes up every time he wanders into it.
Where it sags is the villain. Krem of the Yellow Hills should be the engine of dread that the whole revenge story runs on, and Schoenaerts, who is a genuinely good actor, can’t quite get him there. He’s working hard, but the menace never fully arrives, and there were stretches where he reminded me of Jared Leto, which I’ll let you decide whether to take as a compliment. In a movie this emotionally grounded, a flat antagonist is a real liability, and you feel it most in the final stretch, where the tension should be screwed tightest and instead goes slightly slack. It doesn’t sink the film. It just keeps a good one from getting all the way to great.
Eve Ridley, for her part, is a real find, holding her own against Alcock with a fierceness that never tips into cutesy, and you wish the movie gave her more to do than it does. Because the thing the film keeps glancing at and then flinching away from is its own most pointed idea, and it’s the part I haven’t been able to stop turning over since I left the theater. Krem and his Brigands don’t simply rob and burn their way across the galaxy. They abduct young girls and force them into becoming “brides,” kidnapping the next generation of women to keep their own ranks stocked and growing. It is, when you say it out loud, a breeding trade. An entire male-dominated culture that has decided women are livestock, raw material for the propagation of more men like themselves.
I don’t think I’m reaching when I say that lands differently in 2026 than it would have a decade ago. We are living through a moment when a very loud political movement talks about women in almost exactly those terms, openly fretting about birth rates and “replacement,” floating the idea that a woman’s highest function is to produce children for the cause, treating reproductive autonomy as a thing to be managed rather than a right to be assumed. Krem’s Brigands are that worldview with the subtext removed, scaled up to a galaxy and handed a sword. The movie stumbles into the most resonant image it has and then, frustratingly, mostly looks away from it, sidelining the rescued girls and rushing past a Fury Road moment it clearly hasn’t got the nerve to sit inside. The braver film was right there. This one only points at it.
And maybe that timidity is its own small data point. A Supergirl movie in this climate, made by a major studio inside a franchise that needs to sell tickets in every red state in the country, is going to flinch. It’s going to gesture at the thing and then back away, because the machine I described at the top of all this is sitting right there waiting, ready to clip the boldest version of this movie into proof that Hollywood hates men. You can feel the film negotiating with that machine in real time, and losing a little.
But here’s the thing about moments like this one. They end. MAGA feels permanent right now, the way every movement feels permanent while it’s running hot, but it’s a fever, and fevers break. The grievance underneath it was always just resentment that figured out how to talk in complete sentences, and when the MAGA tide goes back out, and it will, I keep wondering what these critics are going to do. The respectable ones, the bylines with real careers and archives full of the stuff they wrote when “girlboss fatigue” sounded like analysis instead of an apology to the worst people on the internet. There’s no clean way to walk that back. You can quietly scrub the takes, but the internet remembers. You can pretend you were always above it, but the record’s right there. Someday a younger writer is going to pull up these reviews the way we now pull up the critics who sneered at the women and the integration of the old studio days, and the verdict won’t be kind, and it won’t be wrong.
Which is the part that stays with me. Not the muddy third act or the underpowered villain, the ordinary stuff that keeps a fun movie from being a great one. What stays with me is that a flawed, big-hearted, frequently terrific movie about a grieving girl who decides to be good anyway has to walk out into a world that decided to be angry at it months before anyone had seen a frame. Kara Zor-El gets to fly, finally, on her own and not as anyone’s clone. She just has to do it over a field that’s already been seeded with people insisting she shouldn’t have been allowed to. The movie’s worth your time. The noise around it was never really about the movie, and it never is.
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