Last summer, James Gunn’s Superman began a new era for DC Comics. It was the first entry into the newly established DC Universe (DCU) and the first film under James Gunn’s tenure as the co-CEO of DC Studios, alongside Peter Safran. Superman was, by all accounts, a success. It made more than $600 million at the box office and was mostly positively received by fans and critics. I am famously not a big DC girl, but even I felt compelled to see it (and also mostly enjoyed it!). But one success does not a Marvel-level universe make. Not only was the pressure of a follow-up hanging over Supergirl, but the movie is also coming at a time where “superhero fatigue” is a very real thing that Marvel and DC have both been dealing with in recent years. Post-pandemic, superhero movies are no longer a sure bet at the box office. Even though I liked Superman, I am not yet fully bought into the new DCU; I don’t feel the need to see every movie (and show) under the umbrella. But I am a fan of Milly Alcock, the titular Supergirl herself, so I was excited to check this one out. That excitement turned to worry as first reviews and reactions were revealed to be pretty negative. And that worry turned to weariness when those reviews and reactions were proven to be accurate. Supergirl is a totally unimpressive, unoriginal interplanetary superhero movie full of tropes and devoid of vision.

The movie is adapted from Tom King’s “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow” comics and isn’t a full origin story, but more of an introduction to the character. We first met Milly Alcock’s version of Superman’s cousin, Kara Zor-El, at the end of last summer’s Superman when she showed up to pick up her dog, Krypto. This version of Kara is a punk rock party girl. We find her in the midst of a bender, constantly drunk and partying on alien planets. But she’s not having fun, she’s trying to forget, to block out the real world. Unlike her do-gooder cousin Clark who was sent to Earth as a baby and raised by loving adoptive parents, Kara grew up on the dying Krypton, watching the planet and everyone around her die. She came to Earth as a teenager and it never felt like home. As a result, Kara is hardened and lost, stuck in a destructive cycle with no one to care for other than Krypto. So when Krypto is poisoned by a villain named Krem, she teams up with a young girl, Ruthye, who is also seeking revenge on Krem after he killed her family. Ruthye wants to kill Krem and Kara needs the antidote to save Krypto. Kara’s a reluctant companion but finds purpose in her time with Ruthye.

I was initially worried upon hearing the plot description for the movie that this would be another “James Gunn loves to put cute animals in danger” production (if you’ve been keeping up with me for a while you’ll know I had quite a bad reaction to his Guardians of the Galaxy 3 where torturing cute creatures was basically the entire movie). But it didn’t end up being as bad as I thought it was going to be because Krypto is offscreen most of the time and there was never a moment where I actually thought he wouldn’t make it. What I was not expecting was the subplot involving Krem’s band of space pirates, known as the Brigands, being involved in human trafficking. It’s mentioned that they take part in kidnapping and selling underage girls and call them “the brides”, but there’s no further exploration into any of this. I can’t tell if that’s for better or for worse. On the one hand, that’s kind of a wild thing to shoehorn in there and then not fully acknowledge. But, on the other hand, even the brief references to it made me uncomfortable in this kind of movie so it probably wasn’t the right setting to try to delve into such a horrifying and real topic. Probably wasn’t the right setting to include it at all. The best parts of the movie are the flashbacks showing Kara’s life back on Krypton and her arrival on Earth, with an appearance from David Corenswet’s Superman. Maybe because those scenes have some real emotion and authenticity. David Krumholtz plays Kara’s father, struggling with the decision to send her away to save her life, and beautifully performs this tragic scene in Kryptonese. On the flip side of that, when David Corenswet shows up as Superman, you immediately feel his humor and charisma on such a high level that it makes you realize how much it’s lacking in the rest of the film. Clark’s big brother/little sister dynamic with Kara also has so much potential for fun banter but is barely given any airtime in this movie. Hopefully that’s something they’ll lean into more when Kara returns in the future DCU film, Superman: Man of Tomorrow, slated for next summer.

The most damning part of Supergirl, to me, was that I’ve seen it all before in countless superhero movies. It’s formulaic, employing every trope. The plot is a classic “lone wolf and cub” story: a tough, loner warrior has to protect a vulnerable child on a journey (for more on this, listen to my faves at House of R do a ~dive deep~). We’ve seen this in many sci-fi stories, The Last of Us, The Mandalorian, Logan, and more, but many have also drawn comparisons between Supergirl and True Grit. Deadline noted, “the budding relationship between Kara Zor-El and Ruthye, very reminiscent, as some online have already noticed, of Rooster Cogburn and Mattie Ross in True Grit. But Alcock is no John Wayne or Jeff Bridges, and Ridley lacks the spunk of Kim Darby and Hailee Steinfeld. The premise is similar, though: Young girl hellbent on revenge for the death of her father hooks up for help with a somewhat messed-up not-so-super hero who has to rise to the occasion.” Meanwhile, the Krypto plotline pings John Wick and the human trafficking knocks off Mad Max: Fury Road. But the plot isn’t the only area in which Supergirl more than takes inspiration from other films. Where Superman was largely Earth-bound, following Clark through Metropolis, Supergirl is fully set in space, moving from one planet to another, all populated with various alien species. Every time the characters walk into a bar (which happens fairly often), it’s just the Cantina scene from Star Wars. All the corners of the movie are filled with strange looking creatures, meant to give these worlds some character but end up just looking derivative and inconsequential. Also, an issue with having a film set largely in space is that, if not done well, it’s just not enjoyable to look at all the green screens and CGI for two hours. Space can be, and has been, rendered so colorfully and beautifully and creatively, yet Supergirl chooses to make it mostly drab and grungy. Another burnt-out trope the movie features is the slo-mo battle set to a pop song. This is a James Gunn classic that’s been way overused at this point but, to make things even worse, the needle drop they chose for this particular scene in Supergirl is just awful. It does the thing I see a lot in Amazon Prime TV shows where the song choice is too on the nose, the lyrics of the song just say the subtext of the scene out loud. The last of the tropes is the last-second save. It felt like almost every scene ended with someone being rescued from near-death just in the nick of time. It happened so much I started rolling my eyes. I think generally you’re good for maybe one of these per movie. After that, it becomes too unrealistic. Even for a superhero movie set in space. This is all part of the superhero movie aesthetic that James Gunn popularized with Guardians of the Galaxy back in 2014 and, at the time, felt like something exciting and new. But it’s been over ten years and has been ripped off countless times and the aesthetic taste of the culture changes. This isn’t what people are into anymore. A now-deleted Letterboxd review encapsulated the imitative nature of the movie perfectly, saying, “Supergirl feels like someone watched Guardians of the Galaxy and then had a dream about it a few days later and is now recounting it to you”.

Milly Alcock is not to blame for this movie’s faults. She’s very likable and does a good job with the punkiness of the role. But, at the same time, her performance didn’t blow me away or totally carry the movie. I think she has the potential to do more with better material. I don’t love to criticize child actors, but Eve Ridley’s performance as Ruthye falls a little flat. Jason Momoa shows up as Lobo a few times like a shot of adrenaline. I don’t really get his character and he is definitely overacting, but at least he adds a spark of energy to his scenes. Matthias Schoenaerts’ Krem is another generic villain with no backstory, no clear motivation other than being evil for evil’s sake, and a look that’s more interesting than his character. I hate to say this about a female-led movie, but the best performances were from men who had a combined ten minutes of screentime, David Krumholtz and David Corenswet.

Supergirl was always going to have a lot working against it. On the one hand, “Gen Z does not care about superhero movies. That genre belongs to millennials,” one studio head noted to The Hollywood Reporter. And, on the other, some who are fans of the superhero genre are part of the disgusting, misogynistic faction of internet users who flood social media and ratings aggregators with negative reviews to intentionally tank the film performance. But recent reporting following the movie’s release points towards internal friction as well that may have impacted the quality of the film. The Hollywood Reporter came out with an article citing multiple sources that say producer James Gunn and director Craig Gillespie had creative differences over the direction of the movie and that there were competing cuts of the film, one from Gillespie and one from the studio. There were disagreements over the music and the climactic fight scenes. Filming wrapped in May 2025 and apparently all parties knew by the fall that the movie wasn’t working. Some say this where the schism began while others argued there was a normal amount of friction between filmmaker and studio. Either way, they were right: the movie didn’t work. Supergirl made just $37.1 million at the box office opening weekend on a budget of $180 million. That’s an even lower opening than the critically reviled Joker: Folie à Deux which made $37.6 million. The movie also received a B- Cinemascore among opening-night audiences, the lowest of any DC Comics movie adaptation other than Joker: Folie à Deux. I haven’t even seen Joker: Folie à Deux (I refuse to) and I know that’s a way worse movie than Supergirl.

So where does that leave the brand new DCU? Supergirl is only the second feature film in this new world, but it’s the first not written or directed by James Gunn. The entire corporate set-up of this cinematic universe is an interesting experiment. As pointed out by The Hollywood Reporter, “Other studio heads, such as Marvel’s Kevin Feige or Warners’ Pam Abdy, are known to get vigorously involved in the post-production process. But none are filmmakers making their own movies while also running, or co-running, a major studio division. There is almost no modern precedent (Steven Spielberg runs Amblin, a production company, not a studio arm. Rob Reiner was a partner at Castle Rock, a large scale entity that was run by Alan Horn. More recently, Frozen filmmaker Jennifer Lee ran Walt Disney Animation Studios until 2024 before stepping back to refocus on directing.) The challenge for Gunn, and thus DC Studios, is to navigate the fine line of being filmmaker friendly while also trusting his strong artistic point of view that has guided him all his career.” Supergirl was the first major test to see if Gunn could run a studio that’s not just limited to his own directorial work. So far, it hasn’t been entirely successful. But the only way out is through and the DCU has plenty of projects in the near future that have some actual positive buzz, like the upcoming Lanterns TV series on HBO and October’s full-blown horror movie, Clayface. What I’m personally more concerned about is where female-led superhero movies go from here. Supergirl is part of a history of disappointing genre movies with a female lead. A select few have had box office success (Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel), and the fully female-centric Barbie back in 2023 shattered records, grossing $1.4 billion worldwide. But the majority tend to perform poorly in earnings and audience response. Some have even been completely buried by the studios like in the case of DC’s Batgirl which Warner Brothers canceled during post-production as a tax write-down. The crucial difference is that Wonder Woman and Barbie are legitimately good movies. And it often feels like (in addition to misogyny from general audiences) movies made about women and/or for women are given less attention and care. Supergirl’s script was written by a woman (Ana Nogueira) but I am just #noticing that it was directed by a man. The Hollywood Reporter noted in their review of the film, “Given Australian director Gillespie’s history with films about spirited, rule-breaking women, like I, Tonya and Cruella, the failure to find emotional depth in the sisterhood of Kara and Ruthye is notable.” Of course everyone involved was going to put everything they had into making Superman as amazing as it could be. It’s Superman! But Supergirl? Eh. They’ll do what they can. But the lesson no one seems to want to learn from Barbie’s success is that when you make good movies for women, women will show up to see them. In droves. So let’s do better for women in the future because the female heroes getting the short end of the stick time and time again is getting exhausting and embarrassing for everyone. Supergirl isn’t horrible; it’s just not all that interesting. I was unimpressed and I wanted more. I do want more.

2026 Count: 50 movies, 30 seasons of television, 1 special