When James Gunn rolled out his Superman in summer 2025, the film pulled in over $600 million globally and earned restrained but positive reviews, pulling DC back from the disaster spiral the previous decade had thrown at it. Seven months later, on June 26, 2026, the next chapter arrives — and it isn’t Superman, it’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. This is where Gunn’s stated mission as a director gets really interesting. Because Superman was a known myth that needed rebuilding. Supergirl is a character cinema audiences barely know — and one who’s arriving with a tone that’s anything but conventional.
The film is the second theatrical entry in DC Universe Chapter One: Gods and Monsters (after Peacemaker season 2). Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Cruella) is in the director’s chair, and Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s 2021 eight-issue comic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is the source material. The $200 million budget that Forbes initially floated was personally denied by Gunn on Threads — the real number is likely much smaller. Here’s what’s coming.
Who is this Supergirl?
Milly Alcock — one of the hardest-hitting breakouts of House of the Dragon season one — plays Kara Zor-El, Clark Kent’s cousin. We already saw the character in the closing scene of Superman (2025): Kara returns hungover from a party on a red-sun planet, crashes into the Fortress of Solitude, lets Krypto pile on her, and leaves with a tossed-off “Thanks for watching my dog, bitch!” That one scene made it clear: this isn’t the 1980s blonde-haired, smiling Helen Slater Supergirl — this is a partying, wounded, alcohol-unrestricted twenty-something.
The reason for that has long been missing from Supergirl adaptations: Kara remembers Krypton’s destruction. While Clark Kent was sent to Earth as an infant and never really had the trauma touch him, Kara watched her planet slowly die. Years passed before she made it to Earth. Gillespie framed the character in a December interview: “This is really an anti-hero story.” Gunn added: “Female superheroes are so often written as too perfect. She’s not that at all — the way male superheroes have been allowed to carry flaws for a long time.”
The story
The film opens on Kara’s 21st birthday. With Krypto at her side, she goes on a cosmic road trip across the galaxy, looking for red-sun planets where she can shed her Kryptonian powers and drink like a 21-year-old Earth human. Along the way she meets a young girl, Ruthye (Eve Ridley), who’s travelling for a very different reason: her father was brutally murdered by a warlord (Krem of the Yellow Hills — Matthias Schoenaerts), and Ruthye has sworn revenge.
Kara — reluctantly — agrees to help. From there starts what the official synopsis calls an “epic interstellar journey of vengeance and justice,” and what was, in the comic, one of the most unforgiving, brutal Supergirl stories ever published.
Jason Momoa debuts in the DCU as Lobo — a notable fact, because Momoa previously played Aquaman in the 2018 DCEU continuity, which no longer exists. Lobo (in the comics, an intergalactic bounty hunter known as the galaxy’s most notorious “bastich”) has been a long-awaited cinematic character, and Supergirl is his proper debut. Sources differ on whether Momoa’s role is brief or pivotal — we’ll only know when we see it.
And yes, David Corenswet does appear as Clark Kent — in a cameo that leaves the door open to bring the two characters back together in Man of Tomorrow, the planned next Superman entry.
Why this film matters
Several reasons. First: it’s the DCU’s real stress test. Superman (2025) got out of the gate — box office success, Gunn’s personal stamp, and the studio can plan again. But a superhero universe never rests on one film, and if Supergirl misfires, the entire “Chapter One” plan may need rethinking. The MCU showed us how this happens too: after Captain Marvel came Black Widow, and every female-led superhero project was treated as a “test case” — even though it shouldn’t have been. Here, Supergirl is essentially carrying the same weight.
Second: the tonal shift. Gillespie has never made a superhero film. I, Tonya was a black-comedy biopic with Margot Robbie, and Cruella was a stylised, punk-attitude Disney spinoff with Emma Stone. Both prove Gillespie can build a female-led film that’s at once antiestablishment and audience-friendly. If anyone can pull off the “drunk antihero space adventure” tone with conviction, it’s him.
Third: the source. Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Woman of Tomorrow (2021) is one of DC’s most critically acclaimed comics of the last decade — it was nominated in multiple categories at the 2022 Eisner Awards (the comics Oscars). So this isn’t a film building from a thin character sketch but from a modern classic that fans already love.
And fourth: Milly Alcock. Anyone who watched the first season of House of the Dragon knows this young Australian actress — now 25 — has a presence and inner intensity rare for her age. Kara Zor-El’s trauma and anti-hero leanings are tailor-made for what she does, and based on her 2025 Superman cameo, Alcock can blend the emotional damage with surface-level party energy.
What to expect
Supergirl isn’t going to try to catch Superman (2025) at the box office — a female-led film in a less familiar context with a cosmic story is probably aiming at $300–400 million globally as a realistic target. The film’s real success won’t be measured in numbers, but in critical reception and the momentum it gives — or takes from — the DCU as a whole.
Two things will be decisive: first, how genuinely the film can play Kara as an anti-hero without flattening her into a familiar redemption arc. And second, how well it captures Tom King’s hard-edged, melancholy comic tone — because if all that lands uncompromised, summer 2026 could deliver a genuinely surprising blockbuster.
A one-line expectation: this isn’t a superhero film in the conventional sense, but a western in the galaxy — and that’s exactly why it could be 2026’s most divisive and most exciting blockbuster experience.
Data sources: FilmDB.co.uk and TMDb. Availability of information may vary, and accuracy is not guaranteed.
ActionAdventureScience Fiction110 min