Biased interview with Supergirl screenwriter

Variety interviewed Ana Nogueira, the screenwriter of what now looks like a total botch job for a new take on Supergirl in movies. It may have been written prior to the official release of the film, but does have what to ponder, and shake heads at in disbelief and sadness. First:

Nogueira, an actor and playwright-turned-screenwriter, was originally tapped to pen a “Supergirl” script when Warner Bros. was developing the movie as a spinoff of “The Flash.” But when James Gunn and Peter Safran were named co-CEOs of DC Studios in 2022, they decided to take the DCU in a different direction — and brought Nogueira along for the ride. In fact, they were so enamored with her take on the Supergirl story — both in its original iteration and her revised pitch, based on Tom King’s “Woman of Tomorrow,” which follows Kara and a young alien girl named Ruthye (Eve Ridley) on a quest for vengeance — that Nogueira will also pen DC’s upcoming live-action “Teen Titans” movie, as well as a “Wonder Woman” film.

Notice how this sham of a trade journal's perpetuating the use of a masculine term, "actor", instead of "actress"? Well that's another problem with this day and age of Orwellian vocabulary, and it's very insulting to the intellect as much as it is to women. That aside, what was so awesome about a tale originally penned by a writer as awful as King, they just had to adapt that? And if the screenplay for Supergirl is that bad, I hesitate to think what a TT and WW movie will be like under her scripting. Now, here's what they say about the addition of Lobo to the story:

Lobo, the cigar-smoking alien bounty hunter played by Jason Momoa, was originally in the “Woman of Tomorrow” comic, but got cut from the story. Take me through the decision to add him back for the movie?

So that was brought to me. [Gunn and Safran] were like, “We want to do ‘Woman of Tomorrow,’ and we want you to find a way to put Lobo in. We think Lobo has a place in this.” I think their thinking was we know Jason Momoa is interested in this, and how can you turn that down? He’s so excellent in it, and you have to find a place when somebody is willing to go there. But at the same time, it also makes sense, because it’s intergalactic. It’s hard to bring Lobo to Earth — he’s always taken place in outer space — so they’re like, “This is an opportunity to bring in this character that would be hard to bring in.”

I knew Tom King had based the comic on “True Grit,” but originally, Lobo was the bounty hunter and Kara was the girl. Then he was like, “That doesn’t quite work.” He flipped it, and he brought in Ruthye. But when I was trying to bring in Lobo, I was like, “There is a third character in ‘True Grit’: Matt Damon’s character,” so if we follow that structure, there’s still room for this guy who is like a frenemy to the two of them. And Lobo is the ultimate frenemy.

From the panning reviews I've read so far, it looks like Lobo's only in the film to look "cool", and little else. Also, there were times in the comics of the past 4 decades where Lobo traveled to Earth, so I don't understand what's the point of this tommyrot. Besides, if they want to take creative liberties to depict Lobo journeying to Earth, they could've if they'd wanted to. That said, what's appalling in the comics is how Lobo was characterized post-Crisis, as some kind of leftover from the Soviet Union who led to the deaths of his fellow citizens on his home planet. This is why it would've been far better to leave him characterized as the Velorpian adversary he began as in the 3rd issue of Omega Men in 1983, pre-Crisis. Because how does his post-Crisis characterization truly count as a "hero"?

The film is about two young women learning to save themselves — and each other. But they also save all these other girls who’ve been kidnapped by the Brigands. How did that come to be?

So, that is not in the comic. I put it in for very boring writer reasons: in the comic, there’s this central planet where there’s been this horrific act in the past — essentially a genocide, an ethnic cleansing — and you find out that Krem was in some way involved. What’s really important about this is them coming and seeing loss that is not perfectly reflective of theirs, but just that deep pain that these girls have been through. And we also had to see that Krem is just like a total POS; that this guy is somebody that we are going to want to see meet a certain end. But I needed it to be something that was happening in the present and not the past, because in the comic, you can jump around to the past, but you can’t do that here. I needed something to feel really immediate, like there was saving to be done now.

I also wanted it to be something that specifically put our girls in jeopardy, so that they would be a target. Because otherwise, I don’t know why the Brigands would come after them. So, it’s those silly, boring writerly things that then end up leading to a larger plot. And it just tracked for me that the Brigands are an all-male race: What do they need?

Better scripting to portray them as convincing villains, and how interesting she admits, in a way, that the end result is boring. That aside, what are the chances the premise she wrote involving the "central planet" is another negative allusion to Israel and the USA, just like in the previous Superman film?

Also, if history items matter, prior to the official opening, Inverse wrote about how the Girl of Steel came to be in the Silver Age, and it also says:

It’s ironic that, despite the impetus of his origin story being his existence as the “Sole Survivor of Krypton,” Superman hasn’t been that in quite some time. Over the years DC Comics has slowly increased the number of Kryptonians who survived the destruction of their planet: General Zod was one of the first, debuting in Adventure Comics #283 in 1961, and since then they’ve added the entire city of Kandor (a population of thousands that accidentally avoided the destruction of Krypton when they were shrunken down and put in a glass enclosure by Braniac), H’el (a Kryptonian clone created by Superman’s father), and even Jor-El himself, transported through time by the machinations of Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan (a creative decision that surely sent psychic shockwaves down Alan Moore’s spine).

Interesting there's no objective description given of what was also a recent take in the past decade on characters from the Watchmen, one that was quite pointless.

In her earliest stories, Supergirl resides at Midvale Orphanage under the secret identity of Linda Lee, only using her powers to aid Kal-El sparingly because he didn’t want her revealed to the world until she’d mastered them. Eventually she’s adopted by Fred and Edna Danvers, makes her debut as Supergirl to the world in 1962’s Action Comics #285, and graduates from high school as Linda Lee Danvers; after her college years, Linda relocated to San Francisco and took up a variety of different jobs in her off-time from superheroics, including serving as a TV news camera operator, student counseling, and even acting. The 1970s was arguably the biggest period for defining Kara as a character – along with her relocation, she also received her first major villain: Nasthalthia “Nasty” Luthor, the stubbornly loyal niece of Lex Luthor who made it her mission to discover the secret identity of her hated enemy, Supergirl.

Kara’s popularity made her a mainstay in Superman lore, earning her two solo comics as well as appearances in other Superman books, but 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths brought her character to a shocking and tragic end. Years earlier, in an attempt to reconcile the canon inconsistencies that naturally arose from decades of different writers, Kara Zor-El and the Superman of the 50s through the 80s were retroactively labeled heroes of the reality Earth-One, while the original Golden Age Superman of the 1930s and his cousin (more on her later) hailed from Earth-Two – Crisis on Infinite Earths was an attempt made by DC editorial to totally erase the Multiverse, having felt the concept ultimately created more problems than it fixed. The reality-destroying villain of Crisis, a being known as the Anti-Monitor, posed so great a threat that heroes were recruited from multiple alternate Earths to stop him; in the battle, Kara Zor-El was fatally wounded while trying to save her Superman, and when the story concluded with the establishment of a new, singular DC Comics timeline, Kara’s existence and sacrifice were erased for decades.

You can reasonably wonder why they didn't draw ideas from the Silver/Bronze Age history for Kara instead of a shoddy miniseries by an overrated writer who spends too much time writing up contrived takes on trauma. Interesting they admit it was tragic that editorial had to mandate Kara's demise in COIE, and took such a casual approach to the whole notion any character who's supposedly a burden should go nowhere but into the grave. But seriously, it's disputable the Multiverse literally made things confusing when it's 2 or more dimensions involved, and even Marvel's had their share of parallel worlds. The article also brings up Earth-2 counterpart Power Girl's history:

After CoIE, Power Girl was folded into DC’s new Prime Earth, with a fresh backstory that presented her as the long-lived descendant of an Atlantean sorcerer. Naturally, this was a disappointment to fans, so when 2005’s Infinite Crisis (a direct sequel to the original) resurrected the concept of the Multiverse, Power Girl’s origin was again retconned to reveal that she had actually always been the Supergirl of Earth-Two, and had somehow survived the destruction of her original reality; this has remained her consistent backstory to this day, a tragic recontextualization that makes her a refugee of both Krypton and Earth-Two. Adopting the name Power Girl to differentiate herself from Superman (and stand on her own with the appearance of yet another Supergirl), Kara Zor-L’s presence in pop culture has largely been relegated to countless jokes about the overtly sensual nature of her costume, but on the page she’s an incredibly intelligent and authoritative character in her own right, with years of experience as a superhero that make her a stark, mature contrast to the frequent depiction of other Supergirls as impulsive teenagers.

And here, I'm not sure fandom was ever "disappointed" with the retcon for PG, so much as with how Infinite Crisis was such a repellent tale begun with a prelude story that forcibly killed Blue Beetle Ted Kord. IIRC, Arion, Lord of Atlantis, the character created by Paul Kupperberg and Jan Duursema in 1982, was the father figure in the retcon, and funny the writer didn't take the time to make that clear. The post-Crisis retcon to PG was tame compared to what came about when Identity Crisis did in 2004. As for PG being intelligent, isn't that thanks to the best writers? Another example of how they don't have what it takes to credit whomever they thought did the best jobs in characterization when given a writing assignment. Who knows, the Inverse writers probably wouldn't even credit themselves if they got the job!

It wasn’t until 2004 that the grandmother of Supergirls finally returned, receiving a rebooted origin in the pages of Jeph Loeb’s Superman/Batman series. Her initial post-Crisis origin involved Kara (chronologically older than Kal) being sent away from Krypton at the same time as her cousin, with space shenanigans delaying her arrival for decades and causing her to meet her younger cousin in adulthood while she has the appearance of a 16 year-old girl; later comics revised this by once again having her home of Argo City survive Krypton’s original destruction, only for her parents to send her to Earth before Argo City is forcibly integrated into the Bottle City of Kandor by Braniac. Her first appearance on Earth sees Kara train with Wonder Woman and the Amazons before she’s kidnapped by Darkseid who plans on making her one of his Female Furies — after being saved by the combined might of the Trinity, the new Supergirl goes on an odyssey of self-discovery around the world, encountering Power Girl, the Teen Titans, and the Justice League before she’s transported to the 31st Century where she temporarily joins the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Since her post-Crisis debut in the early 2000s, Supergirl has gone through a few more reboots and reimaginings, but most of them use her 2004 origin as a launchpad to integrate her into whatever new confusing company-wide reboot DC Comics is going through at the time. Across 70 years and multiple different characters holding the mantle, Kara Zor-El has remained one of the most popular characters in the Superman mythos, growing far beyond her initial conception as a “female Superman” to become a character with a vast library of stories in her own right, including her brief time as a Red Lantern as well as the recent Woman of Tomorrow arc the movie is based on.

Gee, doesn't this prove how unsuccessful DiDio's supposed caring about the character was in the long run? The company wide crossovers, which they didn't bother to clearly mention, were another problem that sunk the return of Kara Zor-El, not to mention the disgraced Eddie Berganza. Some could reasonably say the heavy-handed allusions to sexuality in the 2005-11 series could reflect how corrupt Berganza was, and he definitely helped bring comicdom down the horrid levels it's at now. And here we also have an example of no objective view taken on what stories were written up in the past 2 decades, not even the Red Lantern tale that spun out of the awful Geoff Johns' run on Green Lantern. At least they admit what came since was confusing, though they don't mention it was just plain uninspired as a result of DiDio's forced darkening of the DCU.

Now onto a few more reviews of this sad catastrophe. Here's what a Forbes writer says about the film, and this one is absurd in its own bias regarding the source material:

I have not read the Tom King source material that inspired this story, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, but I know it’s considered quite good and brilliantly drawn and inked. Supergirl is neither of those things. A dull blend of Guardians and an attempt to be Mad Max, but shot with increasingly ugly special effects that have been plaguing many blockbusters and layered on top of a script doing the original source material, and its actors, no favors.

Oh god, is this such a groaner. I've seen some of the art from the original GN, and it's some of the most dreadful, uninspired to come down the pike in the past decade, making Kara look very unappealing and sexless. Let's also not forget how King makes too much of a habit in his writing of relying on trauma themes, and coupled with that, it's exactly why the story makes for a most awful wellspring. Something tells me that, even if the reviewer did read the GN, he'd still be "diplomatic", which is pretty odd for somebody working as a professional reviewer to begin with. And yet, something also tells me that, if the screenplay were based on the writings of 20th century scribes like Otto Binder and his successors at the time, the reviewer would've been far less kind, as though relying upon a more optimistic vision in itself was a crime. And if so, that's very appalling, because it would compound the perception modern reviewers have a grudge against optimism.

There's also another review worth pondering, on 411 Mania, reminding everybody of one of the most decidedly rotten details about the previous Superman movie that's followed up on in Supergirl:

Unfortunately, Supergirl continues an ill-advised plot thread, first introduced in Superman, involving Superman’s parents. The last movie shockingly revealed that Superman’s parents sent him to Earth to conquer it and subjugate the human race.

The revelation is certainly a unique narrative choice, differing from past, more traditional interpretations of Jor-El. However, Superman failed to meaningfully flesh out that detail. Supergirl continues that plot thread to some extent, but it still doesn’t work. Basically, the new DC Universe opened a huge can of worms and has no idea how to deal with it.

It reminds me that 2 decades ago, when Dan DiDio, Eddie Berganza and Jeph Loeb launched the post-2004 take on Kara Zor-El in a new solo book, there was a storyline in issue 16 co-written by Mark Sable where it looked like Kara's father was doing terrible wrongs, which, if the following synopsis at Grand Comics Database is correct, was disgusting, because it claims Kara was forced to kill her mother and her father sent her to kill Superman?!? Well that was abominable, and so too was the premise for Jor-El in Gunn's Superman film. As a result, that's why, if Kara kills Krem in the new Supergirl followup, it not only reeks of moral hypocrisy, it perpetuates some of the most embarrassingly bad storylines to emerge when DiDio was still holding DC hostage to his whims. Also, note the continued use of "revealed", instead of "established", and that illogic is very grating.

Anyway, John Nolte at Breitbart's announced that this new take on the Maid of Might has become a global fiasco:

Supergirl didn’t just flop at the box office this weekend; it is a flop of epic proportions, an abysmal failure that will be remembered only as a failure.

With a disastrous $38 million domestic opening and an even more humiliating overseas take of $30 million, Supergirl is a bigger domestic flop than The Marvels ($46 million), The Flash ($55 million), Black Adam ($67 million), and Morbius ($39 million).

Supergirl’s global opening gross is just $68 million, which means it’s worse than notorious flops such as The Marvels (110 million), Morbius ($84 million), Birds of Prey ($81 million), and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom ($80 million).

Get this: Supergirl’s global is not much better than Madam Web ($50 million) and Blue Beetle ($43 million).

The production and promotion budget for Supergirl is right around $250 million. That makes the break-even number at $450 to $500 million. Supergirl will be lucky to hit $200 million worldwide. Warner Bros. is looking at massive losses. [...]

Well, it certainly didn’t help as the hype machine kicked in that Supergirl star Milly Alcock — who has all the charisma of a sidewalk and the body of a 14-year-old boy — started opening her mouth about how she’s a victim of sexism and Supergirl is queer.

From what I've read of the movie to date, it doesn't sound like there's any love interest or romance in it, quite a contrast to how Kara hoped to find love with a boyfriend in the Silver Age stories. And that's another of the biggest problems with modern movies - PC mandates shun any chance of romance.

In the end, of course it's very sad the result is a movie that adds insult to injury 42 years after the failed Supergirl film of 1984 starring Helen Slater. Now, for all we know, it could take decades until they try again, and for all we know, even then it'll probably wind up being a case of "3 strikes and you're out". Sometimes, ever since the failed adaptation of Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski in 1991, I've wondered if filmmakers and studios are deliberately making these lady-starring action epics bad in order to taint the source material. The new Supergirl movie could sadly be another hint at that.