WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR? Supergirl Is Getting Destroyed by Critics and James Gunn Looks Exposed

There are bad review days, and then there are days where you can feel the room turning against a movie in real time.

That is what happened to Supergirl.

Right before the fan screenings, the review embargo dropped, critics started filing, and the Rotten Tomatoes number began doing the one thing DC absolutely did not need it to do: fall. Not slowly, either. The score was bouncing around in the high 50s and low 60s while people were actively refreshing it live. Fresh, then barely fresh, then rotten, then worse. You could practically hear the panic setting in.

And the ugly part for DC is that this does not feel like some shocking upset. It feels obvious. Predictable. Preloaded.

This is what happens when a studio spends years telling people it has finally learned its lesson, only to roll out another movie that sounds like a corporate identity crisis wearing a cape.

The biggest problem is not the score

The number matters, sure. A rotten score on a movie like this is brutal. But the real problem is the language critics are using.

They are not describing a flawed-but-interesting swing. They are describing a flat, derivative, joyless mess.

That is the kill shot.

When critics start reaching for phrases like “terrible script,” “shallow,” “generic,” “derivative,” and “franchise maintenance,” the conversation changes. That is no longer “some people liked it, some didn’t.” That is the sound of a movie failing at the most basic level: giving people a reason to care.

One of the nastiest writeups compared the film to the exact kind of superhero sludge audiences have been rejecting for years. Another said it played like a lesser imitation of Guardians of the Galaxy. Others hammered the weak villains, the empty character work, the nonstop needle drops, the bad CGI, and the general feeling that this thing was assembled rather than made.

That matters because James Gunn’s entire sales pitch for the new DCU was supposed to be the opposite of that.

He told everyone the new regime would not rush projects into production without a strong script. He framed this as the lesson Hollywood should have learned from the superhero burnout era. No more half-baked junk. No more effects-first storytelling. No more assembly-line cape slop.

And now Supergirl is getting tagged, over and over, for exactly those sins.

That is not just a bad review cycle. That is a credibility problem.

When even the friendly voices turn on you, it’s over

One of the most revealing parts of this whole mess is who isn’t defending the movie.

Usually with these culture-war-adjacent franchise disasters, you can count on a certain class of access media to soften the landing. They will find the angle. They will praise the “ambition.” They will say it is messy but bold. They will throw flowers at the lead performance and act like that solves the movie around it.

That cushion seems a lot thinner here.

Even commentators who should have been predisposed to like this movie came away torching it. That is the part DC should be sweating over. If you can’t win over the audience that was built in to support the premise, the messaging, and the brand direction, then who exactly is this for?

That is why this feels less like normal review turbulence and more like a rejection.

Not a rejection of one scene or one casting choice. A rejection of the whole package.

The Tom King problem was always sitting there

Let’s be honest about something else: a lot of people saw this coming the minute DC decided to adapt a Tom King comic for Supergirl.

That material was always going to be a problem.

Not because comic fans are allergic to change. They are not. They will go with a lot if the movie works. The problem is that the kind of material modern studios keep mistaking for “prestige” often turns into dead air on screen. It is self-conscious. It is emotionally remote. It mistakes misery for depth and attitude for substance.

Then the movie version comes along and tries to sand it into a broad audience blockbuster, and what you get is the worst of both worlds: a sour core with flattened edges.

That seems to be exactly what happened here.

Critics keep circling the same complaint: the movie has the shell of a big genre adventure, but no pulse. No lift. No center. No real sense of heroic identity.

And that is a killer for a character like Supergirl.

Superhero fatigue is real, but that’s not the whole story

We are still supposed to pretend “superhero fatigue” is a fake talking point whenever a comic book movie bombs.

It is not fake. It is just incomplete.

People are tired of bad superhero movies. They are tired of movies that feel interchangeable. They are tired of scripts that exist only to move IP from one release date to the next. They are tired of being told to clap for brand maintenance.

That is what the fatigue actually is.

If a movie looks like it has a real hero, real stakes, and some actual conviction, audiences will still show up. We have seen that before and we will see it again. But if the pitch is basically “here’s another gloomy, sarcastic, half-broken franchise product with a familiar aesthetic and nothing at its core,” people are going to tune out.

And that is where Supergirl looks deadliest vulnerable.

Because this does not sound like a movie people are excited to argue over.

It sounds like a movie people are ready to skip.

What this says about James Gunn

This is where the conversation gets ugly.

James Gunn was brought in as the guy who understood the genre. The fixer. The one with the tone. The one who could give DC a coherent identity after years of chaos. But if the films under his watch keep landing in the same swamp of bad scripts, smirking imitation, and audience indifference, then the brand promise starts to evaporate.

Fast.

We are not looking at a minor stumble here. We are looking at a movie that was supposed to help prove the new DCU had standards.

Instead, it is being treated like another symptom.

If the critic score keeps sliding, and if the audience turnout matches the mood, this could turn into one of the most damaging perception hits DC has taken in a while. Not because people expected Supergirl to be the biggest movie in the world, but because they were told this new era would be different.

So far, “different” is not the word.

It looks like the same old problem in a new wrapper.

And if Supergirl really is this hollow, this derivative, and this badly written, then the worst headline for James Gunn is no longer hard to imagine.

He did not fix DC.

He just put a new label on the machine.