Supergirl (2026) [Movie Review]

There is a genuinely great Supergirl performance trapped inside Supergirl, and the tragedy of Craig Gillespie’s film is that almost nothing around it lives up to her. The second entry in James Gunn and Peter Safran’s rebooted DC Universe, arriving a year after the well-received Superman, Supergirl hands the cape to House of the Dragon breakout Milly Alcock and gives her a bold, punk-rock reinvention of Kara Zor-El to play. Alcock is electric. The movie is a muddle. Supergirl is the rare blockbuster where the critical consensus is almost eerily unanimous: the star is terrific, and the film fails her. Having dug into what went right and what went so wrong, I am sorry to report that the consensus is correct.

The Quick Take

The verdict: Supergirl is carried entirely by a star-making Milly Alcock, who is genuinely great as a hard-edged, damaged Kara Zor-El, but the film around her is a generic, poorly written, visually murky disappointment. Director Craig Gillespie reaches for punk-rock edge and lands on corporate imitation, and a weak script squanders a promising premise and a charismatic cast.

Category	Score
Milly Alcock’s Performance	88 / 100
Story and Script	55 / 100
Action and VFX	64 / 100
Direction and Tone	62 / 100
Overall	64 / 100

Bottom line: A rental at best for most, though Alcock fans and DC completists may want to catch her on the big screen. The movie is a letdown, but she is not. Best for: Milly Alcock fans, DC Universe completists tracking the Gunn-Safran slate, and viewers who can enjoy a great lead performance in spite of a weak film. One caveat: The reviews are not kind, the box office is soft, and the script is the film’s glaring problem. Set expectations accordingly. Format reviewed: Theatrical (Warner Bros. Pictures / DC Studios) | Rated PG-13 | Released June 26, 2026.

Not Your Mother’s Girl of Steel

Give Supergirl this much: it is not interested in the spunky, primary-colored, do-gooder Girl of Steel of legend. From its very first moments, the film signals that this is a deliberate reinvention, opening with Krypto the superdog cheerfully urinating on a newspaper headline celebrating Superman’s latest heroics. The Kara Zor-El we meet is not saving kittens from trees on Earth. She is a hard-drinking, nomadic 20-something drifting from one arid dystopian planet to the next, picking fights in junk-heap bars to a soundtrack of razory needle-drops, dressed in a Blondie T-shirt and an attitude of wounded defiance. Supergirl wants you to know, immediately and emphatically, that this is the punk-rock Supergirl.

The conceptual hook is rooted in trauma, and it is not a bad idea on paper. Unlike her cousin, who escaped Krypton as an infant and knew nothing of its destruction, this Kara was older when her world died. She survived the doomed Argo City and carries the full weight of having watched her home and family perish, and Supergirl frames her hard edges, her drinking, and her rootless wandering as the scar tissue of that loss. There is real potential in a Supergirl who is angrier, sadder, and more damaged than the icon we know, a hero shaped by grief rather than wholesome optimism. The film, loosely adapting the acclaimed comic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely, clearly wants to mine that darkness for something fresh.

The problem, as we will get into, is that Supergirl mistakes attitude for character. The Blondie shirt, the drinking, the wisecracks, and the punk needle-drops are all surface, a costume of edginess draped over a protagonist the script never bothers to develop beyond cool-girl clichés. The reinvention is skin-deep, and once the novelty of seeing a grungy, hard-living Supergirl wears off, you start waiting for the movie to give her an actual interior life. For long stretches, it does not.

What Got Lost on the Way From the Page

It is worth understanding what Supergirl was adapting, because the source material makes the film’s stumbles all the more frustrating. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, the 2021 comic by writer Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely, is widely regarded as one of the finest Supergirl stories ever told, a haunting, emotionally rich miniseries that follows a grief-hardened Kara as she helps a young alien girl named Ruthye avenge her murdered father across the cosmos. The comic is a meditation on rage, loss, mercy, and what heroism actually costs, told with genuine literary weight and gorgeous, expansive artwork. The bones of the film, the revenge quest, the unlikely mentor bond, the wounded antihero version of Kara, all come directly from that book.

The film keeps the plot skeleton of Woman of Tomorrow but jettisons most of what made it resonate, and that gap is where Supergirl loses its way. The comic earns Kara’s hardness through careful, patient character work and uses the quest to interrogate the morality of vengeance in ways that genuinely move the reader. The movie, by contrast, takes the same premise and renders it as a breezy, attitude-forward space romp, swapping the source’s emotional depth for needle-drops and wisecracks. There is nothing wrong with a looser, funnier adaptation in principle, but Supergirl wants the edginess and the cool factor without doing the dramatic groundwork that made the original land, and the result feels hollow where the comic felt profound. For readers who loved Woman of Tomorrow, the film is a particular disappointment, a reminder that having a great story to adapt means nothing if you strip out the very things that made it great.

A Dog, a Sword, and a 72-Hour Clock

The plot of Supergirl is a cosmic revenge road movie, and it kicks into gear when Kara crosses paths with Ruthye Marye Knoll, a young alien girl on a single-minded quest for vengeance. Ruthye’s family was slaughtered by Krem of the Yellow Hills, a brutal intergalactic pirate, and she arrives armed with a powerful family sword and a memorized plea for help, determined to hunt him down. Kara, in full reluctant-antihero mode, initially refuses to get involved, because this version of Supergirl is too busy nursing her own wounds to play savior. It is a familiar setup, the jaded warrior and the idealistic kid, and Supergirl runs it through a sci-fi blender.

What finally forces Kara into the quest is the film’s central ticking clock. Her beloved dog Krypto gets struck with a poison dart, leaving him roughly 72 hours to live unless Kara can track down an antidote, which conveniently lies along the path to Krem. And so Supergirl becomes an episodic chase across the galaxy, with Kara and Ruthye bouncing from one alien watering hole and one fast-paced brawl to the next, crossing paths with other space pirates and, most notably, the chaotic galactic bounty hunter Lobo. On paper, this is a perfectly serviceable structure for a rollicking cosmic adventure. In practice, Supergirl strings together one superfluous, weightless sequence after another, a series of action beats and bar stops that never build the momentum or stakes a quest like this needs. The 72-hour clock should generate urgency. Instead, the film ambles, and the episodic structure starts to feel less like an adventure and more like a checklist.

Milly Alcock Is the Best Thing Here, by Light-Years

Let me be unequivocal, because every single critic who has seen Supergirl agrees on this point: Milly Alcock is fantastic, and she is the only thing keeping the film aloft. The Australian actress, who broke out as the young Rhaenyra in House of the Dragon and made a brief cameo as Kara in last year’s Superman, takes a thinly written role and invests it with far more charisma, edge, and vulnerability than it deserves. Alcock shifts believably between a fiercely menacing cosmic force, a genuinely funny wisecracker, and a damaged young woman barely holding her grief together, and she does it with a magnetic, punky, wild-child energy that makes you wish the movie around her were worthy of the effort.

This is a genuine star-making turn delivered in a vehicle unworthy of it, and there is something almost poignant about watching Alcock single-handedly drag Supergirl toward respectability. She finds notes of humanity in Kara that the screenplay never earns, and her commitment to the physically demanding role is total. The wave of warm critical praise for Alcock is especially gratifying given the ugly, misogynistic trolling she endured from toxic corners of fandom in the lead-up to release, abuse that had nothing to do with her actual work, which turns out to be the best reason to see the film. If Supergirl accomplishes one thing, it is confirming that Milly Alcock is a legitimate movie star with range and presence to spare. The frustration, shared by nearly everyone who has reviewed the film, is that she deserves a far better showcase than this. I look forward to seeing her in projects that do not squander what she brings.

What makes Alcock’s work here even more impressive is the specific challenge of the role. Playing a hard-drinking, emotionally guarded antihero is a trap for a young actor, because the character’s defenses can easily read as a single flat note, all snark and swagger with nothing underneath. Alcock keeps finding the underneath. She lets the grief flicker through the bravado, plays the loneliness behind the wisecracks, and suggests a wounded person using attitude as armor rather than simply being attitude incarnate. It is a tightrope the script gives her almost no help in walking, and she walks it anyway. There is a real argument that Alcock’s Kara is the best-acted performance in the new DC Universe so far, which makes it all the more maddening that it is stranded in the weakest film. When the eventual highlight reels of her career are assembled, the work she does in Supergirl will hold up even if the movie around it does not, and that is both a testament to her and an indictment of everything else on screen.

Lobo, Krem, and a Galaxy of Underused Talent

The supporting cast of Supergirl is stacked, and the film mostly wastes them, which becomes its own recurring frustration. Jason Momoa, in a fun bit of stunt casting, swaps the trident he carried as Aquaman in the previous DC regime for the role of Lobo, the cigar-chomping, motorcycle-riding intergalactic bounty hunter beloved by comics fans. Momoa is clearly having a blast, and Lobo is exactly the kind of anarchic presence this material needs more of, but the film never quite figures out how to deploy him for maximum impact. He is a highlight by default, a charismatic actor in a flashy role, but Supergirl leaves you wanting a sharper, funnier version of what he is doing.

Elsewhere, the talent-to-payoff ratio only gets worse. Matthias Schoenaerts, a tremendous dramatic actor, is saddled with the villain Krem of the Yellow Hills, a derivative, Mad Max-reject heavy buried under face piercings and a wandering accent, a character who never rises above generic menace. Eve Ridley, as the vengeful young Ruthye, is a charismatic find who, like Alcock, deserves better material, but her arc is hampered by the same thin writing that afflicts everyone. David Corenswet briefly reprises his Superman in scattered, clumsily deployed flashbacks, and capable performers like David Krumholtz and Emily Beecham drift through underwritten roles. Supergirl assembles a genuinely promising ensemble and then gives almost none of them anything memorable to do, a waste that compounds the film’s central writing problem. Even Krypto, the scene-stealing superdog, is rendered in CGI so conspicuous that critics singled out how artificial he looks, which is saying something for a beloved canine sidekick.

Craig Gillespie’s Punk-Rock Misfire

The most baffling thing about Supergirl is who directed it. Craig Gillespie is a genuinely gifted filmmaker, the man behind the arresting I, Tonya, the wonderful Cruella, and the tender Lars and the Real Girl, a director known for barbed humor, real humanity, and a distinctive point of view. None of that survives the trip to space. Supergirl is shockingly generic for a Gillespie film, a piece of corporate product almost entirely drained of the wit and warmth that define his best work, and watching it, you keep wondering what happened to the filmmaker who made those earlier movies sing.

The film’s defining miscalculation is its relentless commitment to being punk rock. Supergirl drapes itself in the trappings of rebellion, the grungy aesthetic, the needle-drops from artists like Wet Leg and Halsey, the desert-dystopia Mad Max cosplay, the hard-drinking antihero posturing, and it mistakes all of that surface attitude for genuine edge. The result feels less like authentic subversion and more like a focus-grouped, studio-sanctioned approximation of cool, rebellion as a marketing brief. As one critic memorably put it, the movie is desperate to be punk rock but ends up a punk crock, an act of corporate pretension cosplaying as anarchy. Gillespie may have convinced himself that the Mad Max Lite styling made Supergirl a clever genre subversion, but the execution is too generic and too safe to earn that reading. There are flashes of what this film could have been, mostly whenever Alcock or Momoa is allowed to cut loose, but the overall package is a strangely anonymous misfire from a director who should have made something with far more personality.

The Script Is the Kryptonite

If there is one thing that sinks Supergirl, it is the screenplay, and the criticism on this point has been brutal and nearly universal. The film’s script, credited to Ana Nogueira, has been singled out as its fatal weakness, with one prominent review going viral for calling it among the worst it could remember in a comic-book movie. That is surely hyperbole, the genre has produced genuine disasters, but the fact that the line resonated so widely tells you how thoroughly the writing undermines everything else. There is a bitter irony here, given that DC Studios co-chief James Gunn built his entire pitch for the rebooted DC Universe around a script-first philosophy, and Supergirl plays like exactly the kind of underdeveloped material that philosophy was meant to prevent.

The problems are fundamental. The plot is a thin, episodic chase strung together with little narrative momentum or rising stakes. The character work is shallow, with Kara defined by cool-girl clichés rather than genuine interiority and the supporting cast left underdeveloped. The humor frequently falls flat, and the film’s attempts at thematic weight tend to land with a thud. An early scene in which a young character pointedly asks why Superman gets to be a man while Supergirl is not called Superwoman is the sort of on-the-nose, surface-level gesture that several critics found heavy-handed, a thematic point raised and then dropped rather than genuinely explored. The bones of a good story are visible, the grief-stricken hero, the revenge quest, the unlikely bond between Kara and Ruthye, but Supergirl never develops them into anything that resonates emotionally. It is the kind of script that gives a talented cast nothing to build on, and no amount of charisma can fully compensate. One wonders whether the studio’s rush to get Supergirl into theaters just a year after Superman left the screenplay underbaked, a we-will-fix-it-as-we-go gamble that did not pay off.

Muddy Skies: The Action and VFX

A superhero film can sometimes survive a weak script on the strength of spectacle, but Supergirl cannot, because its visual execution is one of its most criticized elements. Reviewers have repeatedly described the film as murky, dark, and gray, with action sequences that range from passable to forgettable and visual effects that frequently disappoint. One critic memorably dismissed the imagery as muddy CG sludge, and the complaint recurs across the reviews: for a cosmic adventure that should be bursting with color and wonder as it hops across alien worlds, Supergirl too often looks drab, dim, and unconvincing.

This is a real problem for a film like this. The whole appeal of a galaxy-spanning Supergirl adventure is the promise of imaginative worlds, dazzling powers, and big-screen spectacle, and when the action is merely competent and the effects look unfinished, the film has little left to fall back on once the script falters. The previously mentioned CGI rendering of Krypto is emblematic of the larger issue, an effects-driven element that calls attention to its own artificiality rather than selling the illusion. There are flashes of decent action, and Alcock throws herself into the physical demands of the role with total commitment, but the set pieces of Supergirl rarely achieve the weight, clarity, or visual splendor that the genre demands at this budget level. For a film reportedly costing $170 million to produce, the muddy, generic look is a genuine disappointment, and it removes the one thing that might have let the movie coast past its writing problems.

A Rough Landing for the DCU

The release of Supergirl carries real stakes for Warner Bros. and DC Studios, and the early signs are not encouraging. The film opened to roughly $18 million on its first day and is tracking toward a soft domestic opening weekend in the neighborhood of $50 million, a figure that lands well short of the $125 million debut that Superman posted last summer on its way to $618 million worldwide. Against a production budget of $170 million, and a combined production-and-marketing spend that industry observers estimate much higher, Supergirl will need real staying power to justify its cost, and a B-minus CinemaScore from audiences, compared to the A-minus that greeted Superman, suggests the word of mouth may not provide it.

This matters because Supergirl is only the second film in the rebooted DC Universe that Gunn and Safran are constructing, and it was meant to build momentum coming out of Superman’s success. Instead, it lands as the lowest-rated and softest-opening live-action entry in the new slate so far, a stumble for a franchise that can ill afford one this early. The broader context is not kind either, with superhero fatigue a genuine and oft-discussed phenomenon and audiences increasingly unwilling to turn out for anything but the very best the genre offers. None of this is Milly Alcock’s fault, and the new DC Universe has plenty of runway ahead of it, with the body-horror title Clayface due in the fall. But Supergirl was an opportunity to prove the reboot had real legs, and on the evidence of both the reviews and the box office, it represents a clear setback rather than the soaring launch the studio surely hoped for. The franchise will fly again. This particular flight just never quite got off the ground.

Film Specifications

Detail	Information
Film Title	Supergirl
Year	2026
Director	Craig Gillespie
Screenplay	Ana Nogueira
Based on	DC Comics’ Supergirl and the comic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by Tom King and Bilquis Evely
Studio	DC Studios / Warner Bros. Pictures
Producers	James Gunn, Peter Safran
Cast	Milly Alcock, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jason Momoa, David Corenswet, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham
Cinematography	Rob Hardy
Music	Claudia Sarne
Editing	Fred Raskin, Tatiana S. Riegel
Production Companies	DC Studios, Troll Court Entertainment, The Safran Company
Budget	$170 million
Rating	PG-13
CinemaScore	B-
World Premiere	June 22, 2026 (Brooklyn, New York)
US Release Date	June 26, 2026

Should You See Supergirl? The Final Word

Supergirl is a frustrating film, the kind that makes you a little angry precisely because the raw materials for something good are right there on screen. Milly Alcock delivers a genuine star-making performance as a darker, sadder, punkier Kara Zor-El, and a charismatic supporting cast that includes a clearly delighted Jason Momoa shows up ready to play. The premise, a grief-stricken Supergirl swept into a cosmic revenge quest, has real promise, and there is a version of this movie that works. But that version did not make it to the screen. What did is a generic, dramatically inert blockbuster undone by a widely panned script, murky and unconvincing visuals, and a director seemingly working far below his ability, all wrapped in a punk-rock pose that feels more corporate than cool.

So should you see it? If you are a devoted Milly Alcock fan or a DC Universe completist determined to track every step of the Gunn-Safran slate, there is enough in her performance to justify a ticket, and seeing a future star announce herself is its own kind of reward. For most everyone else, Supergirl is a wait-for-streaming proposition at best, a film whose pleasures are real but isolated, marooned in a movie that never figures out what to do with them. I genuinely hope this is not the last we see of this version of Kara, because Alcock has more than earned another flight in a film worthy of her. Supergirl is in theaters now. Go for the star, but temper your expectations for everything around her.

Supergirl (Warner Bros. Pictures / DC Studios) | PG-13 | Released June 26, 2026

Supergirl is in theaters now from Warner Bros. Pictures and DC Studios. See it for the star, and hope the next one gives her a story worth her talent.