Pour one out for Supergirl, the latest installment in the DCU’s Gods and Monsters chapter, which has been beset by online troll attacks, mixed reviews, and a very disappointing opening weekend box office—not the outcome Warner Bros. was hoping for with this follow-up to last year’s Superman. It’s actually a pretty good movie, as such films go, but it’s not a great movie. And in today’s over-saturated superhero market, that’s just not sufficient to get people out of their homes and into theaters, rather than waiting for the film to come to streaming platforms.
(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)
The studio tapped Ana Nogueira to write the script, a holdover from the former DCEU plans for a standalone Supergirl film. (The character appeared in the finale of 2022’s The Flash, played by Sasha Calle.) The project was reimagined when James Gunn and Peter Safran took over and launched the “soft reboot” DCU. Director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl, I Tonya) signed on to direct.
The story is adapted from the comic book miniseries Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which was partially inspired by the 1968 classic Western, True Grit. Gillespie envisioned his film as a kind of interplanetary road movie, with Kara Zor-El/Supergirl (Milly Alcock) teaming up with Jason Momoa’s wild bounty hunter, Lobo, in a dynamic reminiscent of Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn. Lobo ended up being more of a cameo appearance; he is not featured at all in the comic miniseries, which focuses on Kara’s budding friendship with a vengeance-seeking alien child. That’s the arc the film settled on, one that harkens back to the DC Comics Silver Age.
