‘Supergirl’ at 40: Is One of the Biggest Superhero Flops Good, Actually?

As James Gunn laid out plans for a new series of movies based on DC Comics characters, he naturally chose to kick things off with a new Superman film, due out next summer. Though Superman has appeared in several of the previous regime’s DC movies, it’s been over a decade since there was a solo Superman film in theaters, and he remains DC’s most powerful and iconic hero, even if Batman has eclipsed him in popularity. It was a bit more surprising to learn that the second DC film would feature Superman’s cousin, Supergirl – though it’s been even longer since she starred in a feature film.

In fact, Supergirl first hit theaters 40 years ago this week, in November of 1984, from TriStar Pictures – not even DC Comics parent company Warner Bros., who let the film go when rights-controlling producers wanted to delay its U.S. release from summer to fall. As such, it came out a few weeks after A Nightmare on Elm Street, which spawned six sequels and a cultural icon; Supergirl spawned none. It also came out a few days after Night of the Comet, a cult genre movie, also about young women, which made a sum of money nearly identical to this big-budget spinoff from the popular Superman film series. In 1978, Superman made audiences believe a man could fly. In 1984, Supergirl made studio executives believe a superhero could flop.  

Because of this and many other factors – some more to do with gender than quality – Supergirl has long been considered a bottom-of-the-barrel superhero movie, in continuity with its ’80s companions but even worse. (Christopher Reeve famously declined to appear in it, forcing a rewrite.) This reputation is not entirely justified. Superman III and Superman IV waste many good ideas between them, and remain disappointing in 2024, next to their superior predecessors; Supergirl, whatever its shortcomings, plays like more of an oddball bonus track than a disappointing sequel. It’s a loopier variation on the Superman origin, with elements of ’80s fantasy, low-rent sci-fi, and teenage romance, with a charming debut performance from Helen Slater as Kara Zor-El.

Spared from the destruction of the planet Krypton, teenage Kara has been living in the “trans-dimensional space” of Argo City – basically Bonus Krypton – but travels to Earth in pursuit of a powerful energy source that accidentally escapes and falls into the hands of the witch Selena (a hammy Faye Dunaway, who seems to have been hired on the basis of needing a female equivalent of ’70s stars like Gene Hackman or Marlon Brando in this lower-rent offshoot). Along the way, she encounters the movie’s tenuous connection to the Superman films: Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure), and Lois Lane’s younger sister Lucy (Maureen Teefy). She also falls in love with a dopey groundskeeper named Ethan (Hart Bochner), who becomes her de facto damsel in distress. Supergirl spends some time in the Phantom Zone; she also seems to have a textile-related superpower that spontaneously generates both her Supergirl uniform and her schoolgirl disguise.

It’s silly! It’s all very silly, and I can’t say much for the guiding directorial hand of Jaws 2 and Santa Claus: The Movie auteur Jeannot Szwarc. But that silliness has some real charm to it. As with a lot of media aimed specifically at a younger female audience, Supergirl was dismissed as frivolous and cheesier than the more male-oriented counterpart just because it involved a young woman doing superhero stuff. And as with a lot of such media, there’s perhaps a thin line between defending the movie’s right to a more feminine superhero story and its potentially sexist conception of that story. (No one bats an eye at Jimmy Olsen romancing a high school student here.)

But, look: Supergirl, though not without its missteps, has a more consistent command of its campy tone than Superman III, which is just as ridiculous while utterly failing to find a way to merge a Superman adventure with a Richard Pryor comedy. There are some on-campus fish-out-of-water antics when Kara goes undercover at an all-girl high school before the movie segues back into the fantastical stuff – not so different from the structure of Wonder Woman, really, though with admittedly less emotional heft (but also no insistence on the male love interest sharing the lead’s heroism). Supergirl also has a better understanding of what so many superhero pictures ignore even today: The fact that a lot of children will be watching it – at least at some point, as not a lot of anyone watched it in movie theaters. Supergirl would go on to become a cornerstone character for the recent incarnations of DC’s Superhero Girls franchise, and while Helen Slater’s take on the character isn’t as powerful or multifaceted as those, she’s is a wide-eyed sweetheart who nonetheless has no trouble dispatching predatory men who harass her when she arrives on Earth. Not bad for the first female-led superhero movie from DC or Marvel.

Still, it wasn’t enough to save Kara at the box office. After the movie flopped with critics and audiences, Supergirl as a character would remain relatively dormant even in the comics for the next bunch of years, before another series of print reboots. Unlike Superman, whose origin has been recounted and streamlined enough times that it’s almost universally known, the Supergirl identity has shifted multiple times over the years. Today, she’s probably best-known for a long-running CW series; another version of Kara appeared in The Flash, one of the final films in the most recent DC cycle. (Even there, she’s an alternate-universe character.) Her upcoming solo film is based on Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, a terrific miniseries that hit comics shelves in 2021 that basically casts a still-youthful Supergirl as a version of True Grit’s Rooster Cogburn in a poetically written intergalactic adventure.

In other words, if it sucks, it’ll be super-disappointing. With benefit of 40 years’ hindsight, the original Supergirl has no such problems with expectations. Coming off a decade of superhero saturation, this is one that remains an unlikely underdog.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.