Milly Alcock Says Insulting the Audience Is A Marketing Strategy While Supergirl Tracks Toward a Weak Opening
Milly Alcock sat down with Variety this week for a cover story ahead of Supergirl‘s June 26 release, and in the middle of a lengthy profile about her working-class roots and punk rock screen presence, she said the quiet part loud.
On the backlash to her earlier comments about women in superhero spaces, Alcock told Variety: “I didn’t even say ‘men’ — I said ‘people!’ And they got so angry. I was like, ‘You’re proving my point. You’re proving my point!’”
On the type of person she imagines criticizing her: “A lot of people whose profiles have no photo, who are burner accounts. Or someone’s name and then ‘Dad of four, Christian,’ which is hilarious to me. But I mean, whose opinion do you really care about? If you’re pissing the right kind of people off, you’re doing OK.”
The people Alcock is mocking, fathers with families who attend church, are the demographic that buys tickets to summer blockbusters, fills seats at franchise films, and has kept superhero movies commercially viable for two decades. They are not burner accounts. They are the audience. And the star of a $150 million-plus DC film just told Variety they are hilarious and that alienating them is a marketing strategy.
This is not Alcock’s first run at this. In March she told Vanity Fair that “simply existing as a woman in that space is something that people comment on” and that audiences have “become very comfortable having this weird ownership of women’s bodies.” The backlash from that interview was immediate. Rather than walk it back, she doubled down in Variety by reframing the critics as anonymous trolls and Christian dads whose opinions she does not value.
DC Studios co-chairman Peter Safran called her after the March controversy to offer reassurance. “I called her and just said, ‘You’re doing great! You’re handling it beautifully,’” Safran told Variety. The studio head of a major franchise film told his lead actress she was handling audience alienation beautifully. That is the institutional posture behind this marketing campaign.
The box office picture makes Alcock’s strategy look considerably less clever. Current tracking puts Supergirl’s awareness score at 53 and interest at 48. For comparison, Mortal Kombat II had 48 awareness and 48 interest shortly before release — and then dropped on opening weekend, finishing at $38.5 million domestically against earlier projections of $50 million. Industry analysts say Supergirl needs more than $70 million domestically to be considered a genuine success, and must clear $30 million just to rank among DC’s last five opening weekends — a list that includes Blue Beetle’s $25 million disaster.
Superman, James Gunn’s first DCU film, opened to $125 million domestically last summer. Supergirl must surpass that number to set a new benchmark for the DCU. Current tracking suggests it will not come close.
The Gunn-era DCU is already a story of underperformance. Superman’s $600 million worldwide was described in the Variety article itself as “a promising beginning, but not a home run.” For a franchise reboot with this level of corporate investment behind it, $600 million on the first film set the bar. The second film, whose lead actress is actively telling Christian fathers their opinions are hilarious, is tracking toward an opening that industry analysts consider borderline.
Variety’s own framing toward the end of the piece is telling: “It will be wonderful, of course, if Supergirl is a blockbuster, proving, as Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel did before it, that broad audiences will go see a woman superhero, and that the trolls and incels on the internet can just move along onto their next hateful campaign.”
That is the trade press framing the audience as trolls and incels while the star frames them as hilarious Christian dads. The magazine and the actress are aligned. The audience being described is the one being asked to buy tickets on June 26.
Wonder Woman worked because Gal Gadot played the character with warmth, heroism, and genuine appeal to a wide audience. Captain Marvel was divisive, and its sequel bombed. The precedent Alcock’s camp keeps invoking cuts both ways.
Pissing off Christian dads may feel like good marketing from a Los Angeles breakfast table. It tends to look different on the opening weekend grosses.
What does Supergirl need to open to for you to consider James Gunn’s DCU on track? Let us know in the comments.
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