Variety Defends Owen Gleiberman Over Supergirl Review Backlash

Variety is defending its chief film critic after a negative Supergirl review triggered a blogosphere backlash. On July 1, 2026, Page Six reported that a representative for the magazine told the outlet: “Variety has a long history of supporting our critics and encouraging them to express their honest and independent points of view. We fully stand by Owen Gleiberman and his review of ‘Supergirl.’” The defense arrives nearly five years after the same magazine issued an editor’s note apologizing to Carey Mulligan over similar language in another critic’s review, and the contrast between the two responses is now the story inside the story.

Gleiberman’s review, published on Variety’s site on June 24, 2026, called the new DC Studios film “super-horrendous,” described its script as “the worst script I can remember,” and closed by branding the picture “a punk crock.” The line that drew the loudest objection sat in the middle of an otherwise standard character sketch: Milly Alcock, the 26-year-old Australian actress playing Kara Zor-El, looked, Gleiberman wrote, “like Kristy McNichol crossed with the Feral Kid from ‘The Road Warrior’ in oversize Penny Lane sunglasses.” Variety’s own follow-up column on the film’s box office failure quoted the same review line as evidence the picture was unredeemable.

What Gleiberman Wrote About Supergirl

The Supergirl review ran long and ran hot. Gleiberman opened by conceding that “Superman,” the first James Gunn DC Studios film, was “trying to be so many things at once,” then used that concession to argue its sequel was something worse: a movie that “thinks it’s ‘punk rock'” and never lets go of the pose. The villain, Krem of the Yellow Hills, was “an overly derivative ‘Mad Max’ reject.” A reference to Superman calling his heroism “punk rock” was, in Gleiberman’s telling, “the second you call anything ‘punk rock,’ it has ceased, in that moment, to be ‘punk rock.'”

Alcock took the brunt of the review’s most quoted passage. After noting she is 26, Gleiberman wrote that “as Kara she has the look and aura of someone younger, with a touch of wild-child ’70s androgyny.” He continued: “She’s like Kristy McNichol crossed with the Feral Kid from ‘The Road Warrior’ in oversize Penny Lane sunglasses. Alcock is likable enough (underneath it all, she often seems like Little Orphan Annie with desert-wastrel hair), but the character as written is so one-note that it’s hard to have much investment in what she’s up to.” Page Six, summarizing the review in its July 1 report, condensed the same comparison to “Kristy McNichol crossed with the Feral Kid from ‘The Road Warrior’ in oversize Penny Lane sunglasses.”

The script, written by Ana Nogueira and directed by Craig Gillespie, was the second target. Gleiberman reminded readers that Gunn had promised DC Studios would not begin production on any project “until the script we have is rock-solid,” then declared the director had delivered “a comic-book movie with the worst script I can remember.” A Variety column reviewing the film’s box office collapse on July 1 quoted the same line and added the damning second half: the movie is “full of action yet numbingly flat.” That sentence and the Feral Kid line were the two passages the blogosphere kept returning to.

Variety Steps In Front of the Pile-On

By the end of the first weekend, the magazine had decided not to soften, retract, or annotate the review. The full statement, delivered to Page Six, read: “Variety has a long history of supporting our critics and encouraging them to express their honest and independent points of view. We fully stand by Owen Gleiberman and his review of ‘Supergirl.’” A Page Six disclosure noted the outlet’s own reporter had worked with Gleiberman at Variety for three years, a transparency note that did not soften the company’s posture.

The defense reads as deliberate. Variety faced a similar flashpoint in 2021 over a review by a different writer and chose the opposite path, posting an editor’s note on the review itself. The magazine’s 2026 stance, holding the line behind the critic and his language, is the public marker of the change. A Variety hit piece on Chuck Norris hours after his March 2026 death drew a separate online backlash and underscored how often the publication finds itself in the defender’s seat.

The Blogosphere Counterattack

The hit pieces had begun within hours of the review’s publication. Page Six catalogued three of them by name in its July 1 report.

• “You Don’t Have to Like ‘Supergirl’ But Writing a Sexist Review Just Makes You Gross.”
• “Variety’s Mean-Spirited ‘Supergirl’ Review: Who Was It Really Targeting?”
• “Supergirl Deserves Better Than the Current Media Feeding Frenzy.”

Two of the articles seized on the Feral Kid line; a third concentrated on Gleiberman’s “worst script I can remember” framing. Page Six documented the smear campaign in its July 1 story, and the piece went further than cataloguing headlines. The outlet reported that rumors had begun circulating online that a member of Alcock’s team had “planted” at least one of the articles, and that another writer who had filed a critical piece had earlier taken an all-expenses-paid trip to the “Supergirl” set in London. Alcock’s representative denied the planting allegation to Page Six: “Absolutely not true!!!” The set-trip disclosure made the timing harder to dismiss.

Not every critic joined the pile-on. A veteran reviewer at a rival publication told Page Six the analogies were harmless. “First of all, I think Kristy McNichol is awesome. And the Feral Kid from ‘The Road Warrior’? Milly Alcock is made to look scrappy. So, I don’t think they’re unfair analogies. That line seems pretty harmless to me.” The conservative entertainment site Hollywood in Toto published its own essay that framed the Feral Kid line as the line a critic should not cross. The site, founded by journalist Christian Toto in 2014 and rebranded from its earlier “Right Take on Entertainment” identity, posted a piece titled “The Bright Red Line This Critic Won’t Cross”, which defended Gleiberman as “an excellent critic” while faulting him specifically for describing Alcock’s look. The post noted Gleiberman’s review was “not his finest hour” and called on critics in general to review films, not actors’ on-screen appeal.

The 2021 Precedent Variety Could Not Defend

The clearest parallel is the Mulligan apology. On January 26, 2020, Variety published a Sundance review of “Promising Young Woman” by freelance critic Dennis Harvey. The review praised the film but described its lead, played by Carey Mulligan, as “a fine actress” who “seems a bit of an odd choice as the movie’s ‘many-layered apparent femme fatale’ protagonist,” noting “distancing aspects of the character’s costuming, hairstyling and vocal delivery.” Harvey also wrote that Mulligan’s performance was “skillful, entertaining and challenging, even when the eccentric method obscures the precise message.” Mulligan addressed the review in a New York Times profile published in December 2020. Variety’s newsroom then appended an editor’s note at the top of the original review.

The note Variety posted alongside Carey Mulligan’s response read: “Variety sincerely apologizes to Carey Mulligan and regrets the insensitive language and insinuation in our review of ‘Promising Young Woman’ that minimized her daring performance.” Mulligan, in the same Variety conversation with Zendaya that ran with the apology, was unambiguous about the principle at stake: “I think it’s important that criticism is constructive. I think it’s important that we are looking at the right things when it comes to work, and we’re looking at the art, and we’re looking at the performance and the way that a film is made. And I don’t think that goes to the appearance of an actor or your personal preference for what an actor does or doesn’t look like.”

The film critic community answered in kind. On February 9, 2021, the National Society of Film Critics issued a statement, later republished by the international critics’ body FIPRESCI, that “register[ed] our alarm at Variety’s shabby treatment of our colleague Dennis Harvey” and concluded: “It is appalling that, in this instance, Variety chose to side with that power rather than supporting its writer.” The statement asked Variety to remove the editor’s note. Variety did not.

Why the Two Verdicts Diverged

Three differences stand out in the record. First, the critics’ status inside the masthead. Harvey was a freelance contributor; Gleiberman is Variety’s chief film critic and a veteran of the trade. Second, the moment in the cycle. The Mulligan apology landed deep inside awards season, after Mulligan had spoken up in a major Times profile; the Gleiberman defense arrived on opening weekend, before any individual complaint had been formally lodged against the language in his review. Third, the underlying verdicts on the films. Harvey’s review was “mostly positive,” Variety’s own apology text noted; Gleiberman’s review was a pan, and the film it critiqued opened to a B- Cinemascore, the lowest of any DC Comics movie adaptation other than “Joker Folie à Deux,” per Variety’s own July 1 column.

Variety’s posture in 2026 couples two claims: the critic has the right to render a verdict, and the critic has the right to choose the language inside that verdict. In 2021, the magazine split those claims, accepting Mulligan’s objection while leaving Harvey’s text in place. The 2026 response refuses the split. “We fully stand by Owen Gleiberman,” the magazine told Page Six, with no editor’s note and no accompanying softening.

Page Six’s report also noted that at least one of the writers behind the Gleiberman hit pieces had accepted a studio-funded trip to the “Supergirl” set in London before publishing. That detail sits uneasily with the genre the articles placed themselves in. A piece arguing a critic has forfeited standing because of one analogy looks different when its own author flew on the studio’s dime.

A Bomb at the Box Office and a Critic Under Siege

Supergirl’s commercial fate complicates every reading of the dispute. Page Six, drawing on studio math, reported the film “earned just $65.5 million worldwide in its first four days in theaters, despite a $170 million budget,” and that it would “need to rake in $295 million in order to break even.” Variety’s own column the same week put the domestic opening at “a meager $38 million in its opening weekend.” The B- Cinemascore on opening night placed the picture at the bottom of DC’s live-action slate.

The fight over one critic’s language is now tangled up with a wider pushback against film critics. Page Six flagged three near-simultaneous flashpoints: Paget Brewster publicly telling a ScreenRant writer “you suck” on X before deleting the post and apologizing; Taylor Sheridan dismissing critics with a two-word sendoff; and Seth Rogen telling a podcast that critics would write differently “if most critics knew how much it hurts the people that made the things that they are writing about,” a remark Page Six noted arrived the same week Rogen’s own film “The Invite” earned strong reviews. Seth Rogen’s complaint about critics hurting people drew its own pushback.

The summary stats from Page Six and Variety’s own column:

• $65.5 million worldwide in its first four days
• $170 million production budget
• $295 million break-even target
• $38 million domestic opening weekend
• B- Cinemascore, the lowest of any DC Comics movie adaptation other than Joker Folie à Deux

Page Six reported at least one Gleiberman critic had filed a follow-up piece headlined “When Will Trade Publications Learn From Their Mistakes and Stop Doubling Down?” attacking Variety for recirculating Alcock quotes from a May cover story on social media. Page Six added that reporters it spoke with said the “doubling down” framing and the lament over the cover-story recirculation were being shared by “vested parties on Team Supergirl.” Variety’s position, as of the magazine’s statement to Page Six on July 1, has not moved.