OUT ON A LIMB: Hating Supergirl Doesn’t Make You a Misogynist.
The opening weekend audience for Supergirl was, in fact, more male than female. It was also just very, very small—and for this, I suspect that the fault lies not with the audience but with the movie itself. The action scenes are a mash-up of the same computer-generated effects we’ve seen a million times; the depiction of Supergirl as a reluctant hero, emotionally guarded and frequently inebriated, is territory that was trod first and better by Guardians of the Galaxy and Jessica Jones. The exposition is clunky; the world-building is half-hearted; the characters are paper-thin; and the side plot where Supergirl intercedes to save a bunch of girls from an intergalactic sex-trafficking operation is truly ham-handed pandering—and also, Mad Max: Fury Road did it better. It’s not just that this is weak storytelling, but that it is trite, old, and boring.
And if moviegoers predicted it would be, and decided to stay home—well, blame the cultural apparatus that foisted this movie on us, by deciding 10 years ago that the greatest measure of our moral and political progress was the genital configuration of the person wearing spandex and punching bad guys on a giant screen. It was an ideologically captured cohort of critics, and the film industry that cared about their opinions, who decided that buying tickets to female-led superhero films was the entertainment version of eating your vegetables. Were these movies any good? Who cared, when they were good for you—and more importantly, good for women?
The earliest rumblings of this phenomenon were observable in 2016, in the cult of astroturfed pseudo-fandom that sprang up around the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters. Whatever excitement surrounded that movie had very little to do with the movie itself; instead, it was fueled by the identitarian glee of taking something beloved by Gen X men and putting a “The Future Is Female” T-shirt on it.
Ten years on, it’s very funny to realize how much of the conversation about this allegedly feminist movie failed the Bechdel test, insofar as critics talked less about the movie itself than about how great it was that it made certain men so angry. It also required a certain amount of amnesia as to the prior existence of female-driven franchises that nobody had to be blackmailed into seeing: Aliens, Twilight, The Hunger Games. And yet, this notion of fandom as political obligation did catch on—not necessarily with moviegoers themselves, but definitely among the people who either made the movies or made a living by talking about them. Within these populations, it was an article of faith that you could basically guilt-trip people into liking the “right” movies by strongly implying that failing to like these films made you a Republican.
Alison Bechdel, the author of the aforementioned “test” eventually admitted, “The Bechdel test was a joke… I didn’t intend for it to become a real gauge.”
So, if Supergirl bombed, what is making money? Creepy Pasta, Toxic Masculinity and a Full Theater: My Take on Backrooms.
Since COVID, my in-theater habit mostly died. Patterns were disrupted and I never quite got back to my prior habits. But I still love the idea of seeing a film in the theater. That shared experience with strangers — and movie theater popcorn — beats at home viewing every time, in my opinion. So last night, at my 11-year-old son’s behest, we went to see Backrooms. He knew all about it — something about a video game or viral internet thing pulled him in. I have no idea about this world.
I texted my 25-year-old son that I was going to see this viral hit.
His response: “lol what?”
Then: “oh with O, makes sense now.”
He explained it’s based on an internet “creepy pasta” that went viral on 4chan and spawned a short video series on YouTube. I mean, is this even English?
I replied, “What is creepy pasta?” thinking it was a typo. It wasn’t.
He broke it down: “Creepy pastas are repostable stories, images, memes or text chains that become viral through people reinventing and sharing them across platforms. They’re like internet ‘commodities’ designed to freak you out.”
I still don’t really get it.
He explained further: “It comes from copypasta — those copied text blocks like the shrug emoji ¯_(ツ)_/¯— but these are ghost stories for the online age.”
Still lost. But I did the equivalent of nodding via text.
I figured I wouldn’t fall asleep, but I also wouldn’t get it. Some meme-based, aesthetics-driven thing with no real storyline — a self-referential, internet-culture rabbit hole “vibe” that I’d never fully understand as a Gen Xer. I still don’t get memes, for the most part.
The movie wasn’t awful, just kind of dumb. And not scary.
And if you don’t fancy that, how about some good old-fashioned revenge and mayhem? Citizen Vigilante Strikes Journalism, Too.
Citizen Vigilante provokes discussion that leftist Hollywood media suppress. Sanders victimizes a family harboring the rape gang, telling them, “I think you brought with you your archaic value system and your commitment to religion over democracy and over anything else, including the rule of law.” Harsh words for a cheap film that nonetheless champions free speech — as indicated by Elon Musk when he posted free viewings of Citizen Vigilante for 48 hours to counter the rampant film-festival-circuit programming for open-border globalist propaganda. Despite the movie’s popularity on social media, the media blackout of Citizen Vigilante (the New York Times has not reviewed it) ignores, as always, the populism that Boll has ignited but that Hollywood no longer acknowledges. Citizen Vigilante proves this truth simply by putting up a fight.
Or, why not go fully digital?
Hollywood is swinging the doors wide open and inviting AI filmmakers in by intentionally not giving their customers what they want. So obvious. Their myopia is destroying their industry in real time, for all to see.
— kurtostergaard (@kurtostergaard) July 6, 2026
2026 at the movies is feeling very much like the late 1960s, as described in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Back then, desperately hoping to make bank one last time, Hollywood studios cranked out musical after musical, trying to replicate the blowout success of 1965’s The Sound of Music. Virtually all of its recombinant clones were rejected by moviegoers for much pulpier stuff, such as Bonnie & Clyde, Easy Rider, and Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, particularly after Hollywood considered itself no longer bound by the Hays Code.
This is an excellent point. I think we’re coming to the end of a period you could describe as the secular version of the Hays Code (the Hollywood moral-code regime that ran from the mid‑1930s to the late 1960s). There's hundreds of stories that couldn't be told in the last… https://t.co/1TqkkeAyj0
— Graham Linehan (@Glinner) July 5, 2026
