Supergirl was already in trouble before Milly Alcock opened her mouth in Variety.
Box Office Theory’s most recent forecast puts the June 26 release opening between $47 and $65 million in North America — a range whose low end matches The Marvels, the 2023 Brie Larson sequel that became Marvel Studios’ biggest theatrical flop. Industry analyst Scott Mendelson pegs the global threshold for “good enough” at roughly $425 million against a reported $170 million production budget. Trailer sentiment has been mixed. James Gunn’s Superman last summer was the year’s highest-grossing superhero film at $618 million worldwide, but it trailed Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel at $670 million and did not break out the way a franchise reset is supposed to. The DCU is launching from a fragile base. None of this is Milly Alcock’s fault. She got handed a heroine to play, and she’s playing her.
Then she did a Variety cover.
In the cover story published May 20, titled “‘Just F—ing Go for It’: How ‘Supergirl’ Star Milly Alcock Learned to Ignore the Trolls and Became a Punk Rock Superhero,” Alcock talked about the people who don’t like her. “I guess women know that this is just how it’s always been, unfortunately,” she said. “And [the backlash] is from a lot of people whose profiles have no photo, who are burner accounts. Or someone’s name and then ‘Dad of four, Christian,’ which is hilarious to me. But I mean, whose opinion do you really care about? If you’re pissing the right kind of people off, you’re doing OK.”
To be fair to her: female actors in franchise spaces do catch the worst of the internet, and Alcock — coming off House of the Dragon and a previous Vanity Fair interview where she described “this weird ownership of women’s bodies” — has caught more of it than most. She isn’t wrong that some of her loudest critics are anonymous accounts who would hate her regardless of how she played the part. The frustration is earned.
The problem is the strategy. “Dad of four, Christian” is, demographically speaking, a description of a person who takes his kids to a PG-13 superhero movie on a Saturday afternoon in June. That is the customer. You can think they’re insufferable. You can wish they were nicer to you online. But if you are the face of a $170 million corporate product trying to clear $425 million worldwide, you do not go on the record five weeks out and tell that demo their opinion is hilarious.
This is where the studio comes in. In the same Variety piece, DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran describes his response to the previous round of backlash this way: “I called her and just said, ‘You’re doing great! You’re handling it beautifully. You’re never going to make everybody happy. Just be true to yourself.'” Reader, the question is not whether Milly Alcock should be true to herself. The question is whether a $170 million blockbuster’s lead actress should be spending her pre-release press cycle workshopping how funny she finds her audience. The job of a co-CEO is to call your lead and gently say, “What if we did the warmth-and-vulnerability beats with Good Morning America and saved the punk-rock energy for the Letterboxd Q&A in July?” That call evidently did not happen.
Did Milly Alcock kill Supergirl? No. The DCU’s growing pains, the genre fatigue, the soft tracking, the brutal June calendar — those killed Supergirl‘s upside long before this issue of Variety hit. Alcock just walked into the morgue and started doing crowd work.
This movie was going to need every demo it could get. It now has one less.
