Critical Drinker fixes a movie he hasn't even seen

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Hey folks, I I need to make sure that we're on the same page here. You need to have a little bit of an ego to post your opinions to YouTube. I that's just the agreement we all make when logging onto this website. You click on a video, you know that the person who made it probably thinks a little too highly of themselves, at least in some areas.

[00:00:18]Whatever. That's life. But sometimes people get a little too big for their britches. Think that just because a bunch of people like their MP4 files, they are experts in almost any subject.

[00:00:28]Today we'll be looking at dubiously functioning alcoholic Will Jordan, better known as the critical drinker, and his video, The Drinker Fixes Supergirl: How Not to Tank Your Movie.

[00:00:38]For posterity, at the time of filming, it is the middle of April 2026, which is to say, Craig Gilepsy's Supergirl has not released and indeed won't release for another over two months. The central thesis of Jordan's video is that he understands superhero marketing better than James Gunn, one of the most, if not the most, successful superhero filmmakers in decades. Don't get me wrong, James Gunn is just a guy who's good at his job. He's plenty capable of making mistakes. But when it comes to quality film making and marketing, I'm much more likely to trust the person who turned Guardians of the Galaxy into a household name, who somehow managed a successful sequel to 2016 Suicide Squad and successfully launched a new cinematic universe at nearly the peak of superhero fatigue. You know, trust him over the guy who has released one short film to date that was so bad he had to make an apology video blaming the cast for his own shitty writing. Although I wouldn't blame you for not knowing that happened, as it seems that I was the first person who realized he'd posted this video, leading to a bizarre week in which a bunch of conservatives who also don't like the drinker had to use me as their only source because the video had been hidden by that point. If you need any more evidence that YouTubers have an unhealthy ego, I really had to torture this script to make an excuse to reference one of my own videos. Now, look, there's a shocking amount of ammunition I could use in Will's video.

[00:01:56]From the fact that much of his B-roll is just footage of Rachel Zgler and other women he dislikes to the fact that he genuinely believes that the quality of his video is on par with actual market research.

[00:02:07]>> Any serious market research would have told them this way in advance. And if they had the common sense, they would have acted on it.

[00:02:13]>> To the fact that he provides additional context whenever he thinks it supports his point, but ignores that context whenever it doesn't. None of this is surprising, of course, but it's impressive how much he manages to pack in such a short time. So, let's give him a listen. You know, all these controversies and bad press swirling around James Gun Supergirl, not by James Gunn got me thinking to myself, surely there must have been a better way to do this. Surely the mega minds at DC could have found a way to introduce this movie to the public in a way that would win people over and get them excited instead of turning them away. And so I asked myself, what could I have done differently if I was in charge? Could the drinker in fact have fixed Supergirl? Like I said, the guy who's never successfully marketed a film in his life has somehow deluded himself into thinking he's a marketing expert.

[00:03:00]Suffice to say, I have high expectations. Truth number one is that superhero movies in general just aren't very popular anymore. I've already talked about superhero fatigue, oversaturation of the market, and the general decline of audience interest ad nauseium in other videos. So, I'm not going to bore you with the whole argument again here. Instead, I'll just point to the MCU's box office returns as an example. In the seven years from 2012 until 2019, the MCU had a total of nine movies that grossed over a billion dollars each. In the seven years since then, you know how many they've managed?

[00:03:35]Two.

[00:03:36]>> I mean, yeah, superhero movies are less popular than they used to be. I got to be honest, I'm not exactly impressed with this observation. And I think that James Gunn is probably clued into that one. But before we continue, I'd like to preempt some comments that I think I'm going to get. People saying things like, "Malachi, the drinker's a sexist. He doesn't care about superhero fatigue. He thinks the Supergirl is going to fail because it's about a girl and not a big strong boy." I to you shrill liberal fools, I'd like to say the following.

[00:04:06]How dare you mischaracterize the rigorous work of critical William Drinker. He is not the kind of guy to say that women are the reason why movies fail. And this is in no way a half-hearted attempt to set up a punchline.

[00:04:17]>> Now, that's bad enough, but shall I hit you with another harsh truth? Well, I don't care if you're ready. I'm doing it anyway. Femaleled superhero movies don't tend to make money.

[00:04:31]>> Hey, don't hate me for telling inconvenient truths. We'll let him make his embarrassing point here in a second, but can we take a moment to appreciate the fact that the first two minutes of this video about fixing Supergirl are take away the super and take away the girl. Look, the defense that Will would like you to use to cover up his obvious disdain for women is he's not saying that women make superhero movies bad.

[00:04:53]He's just pointing out the objective fact that superhero movies about women are unsuccessful. The problem here, of course, is that when people notice societal trends they disagree with, they tend to comment on their disagreement.

[00:05:04]If I were to accept the drinker's logic that superhero movies about women are financially non-viable, I'd immediately start looking for what would be wrong with society to make that the case cuz like I think that sexism is bad, you know? But the drinker is completely cool with this idea. In fact, he's so cool with it, he has to force it into his video. He has no problem with the premise that moviegoing audiences, or his audience in particular, might be turned off of a movie if it stars a woman. That's a-okay with him.

[00:05:31]Thankfully, at least his logic is airtight.

[00:05:33]>> And don't just take my word for it either. The numbers speak for themselves. In the past decade, there's been nine major femaleled superhero movies in theaters. And of those nine, only three have actually managed to turn a profit. Captain Marvel, Wakanda Forever, and Wonder Woman. That means only one in three femaleled superhero movies from the past decade have actually succeeded.

[00:05:56]>> So that's the argument. As long as we ignore merchandising and other brand deals, at six movies didn't make very much money. Therefore, audiences don't like girls in their superhero movies.

[00:06:05]This is a tortured argument on its face.

[00:06:07]I He's attempting to use a sample size of nine to make a broader cultural point as though nine films produced under radically different circumstances are enough to prove that the problem with Madame Webb was the Madam part. And if you're wondering whether he acknowledges Black Widow's cluster [ __ ] hybrid COVID release, of course he doesn't. I acknowledging that Black Widow lost out on box office revenue due to a global pandemic and stupid business decisions might lead viewers to believe that there's more going on here than Woman Bad. But if you'll believe it, it gets dumber.

[00:06:35]>> And out of those three, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel both came out before the decline of superhero movies in general.

[00:06:42]And both of those crashed out with disastrous sequels that brought in 80% less than their predecessors.

[00:06:48]>> Listen to what he's done here. He's noted three femaleled superhero films that were successful, then given you reason to doubt their success. Well, two of them came out when superheroes were popular, so they barely even count.

[00:07:00]Interestingly, he decides to ignore the obvious follow-up. Of the films that weren't successful, how many came out after superheroes stopped being as popular? Drinker references nine films.

[00:07:12]Madame Web, Wonder Woman 1984, Birds of Prey, The Marvels, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Black Widow, Wonder Woman, Black Panther Wakanda Forever, and Captain Marvel. Of the six of these films that didn't make money, five came out after Drinker's 2019 post Endgame cutoff, which he firmly established as the era of superhero decline. X-Men: Dark Phoenix also came out after Endgame, but in the same year, though, it also coincidentally happened to be the fourth film in a franchise that was already on the decline long before it made the blunder of having a girl on the poster.

[00:07:41]The point I'm making here is that Will has already disproven this point himself. Superhero films are significantly less popular now than they used to be across the board, whether they star men or women, with the finality of Avengers Endgame often being considered the beginning of the end. All of Drinker's unsuccessful girl movies came out after this major cultural event that formed the basis of his first point. And several of them came from franchises that were already on the decline long before those films released. In other words, you'd have to be incredibly stupid to look at this information and conclude that the reason Wonder Woman 1984 didn't make money is the woman part. That or you'd have to have a real bone to pick with women.

[00:08:19]Thankfully, Drinker doesn't have one of those. The second unpleasant truth we have to come to terms with here is that if you're a movie studio, the media is not your friend. Yeah, they might be all fake smiles and friendly puff piece interviews, but at the end of the day, they have all the sincerity of a female compliment. This is a clip from later in the video, but yeah, it's [ __ ] exhausting that people pretend the drinker doesn't just have a problem with women. Like, this isn't useful marketing advice. He just wants an excuse to complain that girls exist and sometimes even do cool space stuff in movies. And look, I that's the main thing I wanted to show you and talk about. They openly just think women bad and then act shocked when you call them on it. That said, this video does include recommendations for how DC should proceed. And I think it's worth showing you Drinker's brilliant insight. It would have made infinitely more sense to give the heavy hitters like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman their own solo movies, team them up for a money spinning Justice League crossover, and then start introducing Btier characters like Supergirl in the next phase when presumably you'd have enough commercial momentum and fan goodwill to actually support them.

[00:09:25]>> Here's the thing. I want to condescendingly say, "I promise you they thought of that, dumbass." I want to endlessly mock this idea that Drinker thinks he's struck gold with the brilliant idea of make a Batman movie, but we already know this. I we know that this is unimpressive insight. What I think is more worth calling attention to is the fact that DC has already done exactly this. The DC EU followed almost this exact formula. And I'm not about to say that it wasn't successful at all. It certainly worked for a while. But more importantly, why is the best you can come up with just keep reliving the past? The current DC universe, small as it is, is building a fan base precisely because it's different from what came before. It's making creative choices that aren't AI optimized to produce maximum box office return. And there's a cynical reason for this, that being that that kind of optimism might work in the short term, but long-term success is harder to maintain on that model. But there's also just the fact that filmmakers are artists and like to produce art that they find interesting.

[00:10:24]Market analyst critical drinker would have told you it's a bad idea to use less popular names like Mr. Terrific and Guy Gardner in your superhero movie.

[00:10:32]He'd have asked why on earth they're making a movie about this Guardians of the Galaxy thing that nobody's ever heard of. Why is Marvel starting its cinematic universe with Iron Man and not a character that people already care about? And the reason for this is simple. Will Jordan doesn't have a creative bone in his body. All he remembers is movies he liked in the past. And all he can conceive of is doing those again over and over again until the sun explodes, but maybe with less girls this time. His arguments are bad. He has to manipulate the facts to suit his narrative. But more to the point, the guy is a [ __ ] hack. I He sees film like a billion dollar video game speedrun. His market insight is [ __ ] that any random person off the street could tell you. And it's [ __ ] that a creative writer or a producer might view as a challenge or a wall to break through. In other words, whether it's financially successful or not, the cinematic universe that The Critical Drinker wants is not one that I would ever spend money seeing in theaters. It sounds like hollow slop. And having seen the drinker's own writing put to screen, I can confirm that's almost certainly exactly what it would be. Anyhows, thank you for watching. Consider liking the channel and subscribing to this video.

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