Supergirl hit theaters on June 26, 2026, directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Ana Nogueira, with James Gunn and Peter Safran producing under DC Studios. It's the second film in the new DC Universe, landing about a year after Superman, and it's based on the Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow comic by Tom King and Bilquis Evely. Milly Alcock takes over as Kara Zor-El here, after her brief cameo at the end of last year's Superman, and this is her first real outing as the character.
The story opens with Kara traveling the galaxy with Krypto for her 23rd birthday, planet hopping under red suns so she can feel human for a while instead of carrying Kryptonian strength everywhere she goes. That gets derailed when she crosses paths with Ruthye Marye Knoll, a young alien girl whose father was murdered by a mercenary named Krem of the Yellow Hills, played by Matthias Schoenaerts. Ruthye wants revenge, and Kara gets pulled into the hunt with her.
I went in skeptical, not gonna lie. The Twitter discourse around this one was brutal from the start, and then it got pushed to digital barely a month after leaving theaters, which never says confidence from a studio. So I braced for something rough but it never came. It was just average. Not the disaster people online made it out to be, not a masterpiece either. Right in the middle, which might be the hardest spot for a movie to land because nobody wants to defend "fine."
The Highlights
- Milly Alcock as Kara. I'm already a fan of hers from House of the Dragon, so I'll own that bias, but she commits to this role. This version is written with more edge than past takes, someone shaped by watching Krypton die before she ever reached Earth, and Alcock handles that weight well without turning her into a joyless brick. There's still humor and warmth under it, just layered under something heavier.
- The premise. A revenge road trip across the galaxy with a grieving kid gives the movie a clear emotional core instead of the usual save-the-world plot, and it puts Kara through a more personal kind of test than most origin stories bother with.
- Krem as the villain. Schoenaerts plays him as a straight up menace the whole way through, no last minute redemption arc, no sympathetic backstory to soften him. He's bad news from start to finish, and that consistency makes him land harder than a lot of recent superhero villains who get watered down halfway in.
Fair Warning
- The soundtrack. This is the biggest letdown, and it caught me off guard given how strong the music has been in Gunn's other DC and Marvel work. This one just doesn't have that same spark. Nothing in the score stuck with me walking out.
- Lobo feels underused. Jason Momoa's Lobo was a bigger miss than I expected going in. He's got the biker look down, the teaser they dropped before release looked great, but in the actual film he just kind of exists in scenes without doing much. For a character built on chaos and presence, that's a rough outcome.
- The action and CGI. Nothing embarrassing, they get the job done, but nothing here is making anyone's list of best superhero fight scenes. Decent is the word, not more than that.
Final Verdict
My Rating: 6.8
It's a shame this one bombed the way it did, because it didn't deserve the pile-on it got. The box office numbers were bad, reviews were mixed to negative, and Alcock personally took a lot of heat online that had nothing to do with her actual performance. A lot of that heat was about things completely separate from the movie itself, which says more about where the internet is right now than it does about Supergirl. Feels like everything gets torn apart these days regardless of what it actually is. If you skipped this because of the discourse, it's worth a watch now that it's on digital. Go in expecting a solid, average superhero movie carried by a strong lead performance and a villain who does his job well, not a disaster and not a triumph. Just a movie.
Did the online backlash change how you went into this one, or did you watch it with an open mind?
Drop your take below, curious if anyone else came away thinking it got treated worse than it deserved.
Comments
Post a Comment