Supergirl is in theaters, the reviews are mixed, the box office is soft, and right on schedule, an old take has come crawling back out of the comments. You know the one. Female superhero movies just do not work. It is a take roughly as old as Catwoman, and it gets dragged into the daylight every single time a movie with a woman on the poster stumbles.
It is also, mostly, wrong. And the proof showed up just last year.
The case for the curse
Let us be fair to the doubters first, because their evidence is not imaginary. The genre has a real graveyard. The 1984 Supergirl was a bomb. Catwoman in 2004 and Elektra in 2005 are punchlines. More recently, The Marvels became the lowest-grossing movie in MCU history, and Madame Web turned into a meme before it even left theaters. Wonder Woman 1984 and Birds of Prey both underwhelmed. Stack those up and you can see how the “curse” narrative writes itself.
But a narrative built only on the failures is just cherry-picking with extra steps.
The case against it
Here is what that take conveniently forgets. Wonder Woman in 2017 was a landmark, both a critical smash and a cultural event. Captain Marvel crossed a billion dollars in 2019. Those are not flukes, they are two of the biggest superhero movies of their respective years.
And then there is the knockout punch, courtesy of last summer. Two of the best-reviewed superhero films of 2025 were powered by women, and neither one was marketed as a Female Superhero Movie. Thunderbolts sits at 88 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with a 93 percent audience score, and its entire emotional spine is Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova. The Fantastic Four: First Steps earned 86 percent and grossed 521 million dollars worldwide, finishing as the MCU’s best performer of the year, with Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm at the center of its family. Women anchor great superhero movies all the time. The idea that they cannot is simply false.
So the question is not whether women can carry these films. They obviously can. The question is why the ones explicitly built and sold as female-led solo vehicles keep getting clobbered. And the answers have nothing to do with who is wearing the cape.
The actual reasons
First, the sample is tiny and front-loaded with cynical product. For decades, studios treated female-led superhero movies as cheap contractual afterthoughts. Catwoman and Elektra were not passion projects, they were spun off to chase a trend or hold onto rights, made with a fraction of the care lavished on the men. A small sample stuffed with bad-faith filmmaking drags down the whole batting average, and then that average gets quoted back as if it were destiny.
Second, the framing is the trap. The moment a studio sells a movie as The Female Superhero Movie, it loads a single film with referendum weight no movie should have to carry. Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four got to just be good movies that happened to feature women. They were never asked to prove a thesis about an entire gender. A film forced to be a statement usually forgets to be a film.
Third, source material and development. Female-led solo projects too often get handed thinner pipelines, lesser-known characters, and rushed scripts. Madame Web is the cautionary tale. Even Supergirl had a bumpy road. Writer Ana Nogueira has said she wrote two different Supergirl movies before this one. The men frequently get years of patient iteration. The women often get a swing and a shrug.
Fourth, and most overlooked, the launch problem is about fame, not gender. Supergirl is a second film built on a relatively niche space-comic. Lesser-known heroes of any gender struggle to open. Thunderbolts underperformed commercially too, despite glowing reviews, because almost nobody knew who the Thunderbolts were. A chunk of Supergirl‘s softness is the same story, an obscure-leaning property without a household name, and that is not a women problem.
So, source material? Not enough movies?
Both, a little. Studios do keep picking niche properties and then underinvesting in them, so yes, the material is part of it. And the sample really is small, so yes, every miss looks bigger than it is. But the honest through-line is that the failures trace back to how these movies get made and marketed, not to the gender of the lead.
The other side, fairly
To be square about it, the doubters are not arguing in total bad faith. The data does show a rockier average box-office record for female-led solo films, and overseas markets in particular have sometimes shown softer demand. A studio staring at that ledger is not crazy to be cautious, and you could argue Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel are the exceptions that prove how hard the trick is to repeat. Some of the gap is bias, some is franchise fame, some is simple quality. Pretending none of it exists would be its own kind of dishonesty.
But the lesson of last summer is the simplest one in Hollywood and the easiest to forget. Make a good movie. Cast a great actor. Let the hero be a hero who happens to be a woman, not a debate with a release date. Do that, and the so-called female superhero problem mostly evaporates.
