Today, there’s a lot of pressure on theatrical films in the sci-fi/fantasy/or comic book genres. We tend to call these movies “blockbusters” before they’ve made enough money to truly bust some blocks. And when a big-budget superhero movie falters, the commentary around those missteps sometimes replaces the experience of watching the movie itself. But here’s the thing with Supergirl: while not a great movie, the truth is, had this meant just one part of a direct-to-streaming miniseries, or even part of a bigger arc on the old Arrowverse CW version of a DC shared universe, the pressure would have been off, and thus, Supergirl could have gotten away with something like that somewhat cloying cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle.”
To put it a bit more simply, when you watch Supergirl on streaming — and it’s just hit HBO Max — all of its problems, and all the things its harshest critics lambasted it for, feel somewhat overblown. If you squint and just imagine that Supergirl wasn’t designed as a big, theatrical summer movie, but instead a rocky launch to a DCU streaming series, like Peacemaker or Lanterns, a lot of its shortcomings seem, if not absent, mostly forgivable. If you didn’t catch Supergirl in theaters, now’s the time to give it a chance on streaming, and imagine that this was where it started all along.
