Immediate reaction walking out of the theater: Supergirl is worth your time, it just isn’t the knockout the source material deserves. Craig Gillespie’s film, written by Ana Nogueira and built from Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, lands as a solid entry in James Gunn’s DC Universe without ever fully taking off. Call it a 7 out of 10.
Milly Alcock is the reason to show up. She plays Kara Zor-El as a hard-drinking, disillusioned survivor drifting from one red-sun planet to the next, and the standout stretches are the quiet ones. When she reflects on Argo City and the loss of Krypton, you feel the grief sitting on her. That ache is the whole point of this version of the character, and it sets up a great contrast with the happy-go-lucky Superman that David Corenswet introduced in 2025. The cousins share only a handful of scenes, but the chemistry is there, and it is a duo worth building on.
Eve Ridley’s Ruthye, the orphaned girl who pulls Kara into a galaxy-spanning revenge hunt, is solid. She runs light on emotion through most of the middle, but the open and the close are where Ridley does her best work.
The real surprise is Jason Momoa as Lobo. People kept saying he was born for the role, and they were right. There is a Beetlejuice streak running through the performance, white face paint and all, and every time he showed up I was locked in. He is clearly having a blast, and it is the kind of swing the rest of the movie could have used more of.
My main gripe is Krem of the Yellow Hills, played by Matthias Schoenaerts. They changed how the character reads. In the book his motivation lives in the subtext, the slow burn of a thug whose intent barely matters next to the damage he does. The movie flattens that, telling you he is a brute from the jump and leaving it there. It works on screen, but it loses the texture King put on the page. The film is also heavy-handed about the lesson Kara is trying to teach Ruthye, where the comic lets that land on its own.
That is the thread running through the whole experience. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is one of my top three DC books of the last decade, sitting right there with Absolute Batman and Dark Nights. The movie is good. The book is phenomenal. If you take one thing from this, it is that you should buy the comic and read it. I grabbed both the standard and the smaller pocket version off Amazon for about seven bucks, and it travels anywhere, purse or backpack.
Is it worth seeing in theaters? Yes. Opening weekend, maybe not. If your local theater runs a cheap matinee day like mine does, that is the play.
For the record, the numbers back up the soft landing. Supergirl opened to roughly 38 million dollars domestic against a reported 170 million dollar budget, finishing behind Toy Story 5, with a 56 percent critics score and a B-minus CinemaScore. None of that changes my read. It is a good time and a strong showcase for Alcock, even if it never quite cuts loose.
Sources: Variety Review Empire Review Rotten Tomatoes The Hollywood Reporter Variety Box Office
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