This weekend, Supergirl leaps into the box office. After grabbing James Gunn to help revamp the DC Universe, 2025 saw Superman not only bring in $618.7 million at the worldwide box office, but it also introduced Supergirl, Superman’s cousin, to audiences, only instead of another big smiling do-gooder, we got a blue-and-red-suited young woman who is unafraid to cuss and can probably drink you under the table. The scene was a hit, and mere months after Superman’s release, a poster announcing Supergirl’s release date hit the streets.
This is an important release for Gunn’s DC Universe. Superman was intentional in its place setting, giving viewers a fresh take on the DC Comics characters. Adding this version of Supergirl to the mix helps flesh out the world Gunn has envisioned, but in building this foundation, putting up a brick at the summer box office won’t help the progression of this Universe. We’re getting ahead of ourselves, though; you still need more information on this film. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered; here’s everything you need to know about DC’s Supergirl, which hits theaters on June 26, 2026.
Milly Alcock returns as Supergirl
Alcock was last seen portraying Kara Zor-El (aka Supergirl) in 2025’s Superman, making a fan-favorite appearance towards the end of the film, revealing that the dog Krypto, who’s been annoying Clark throughout the film, was hers. (Clark was dog-sitting while Kara was finding planets with red suns so she could get wasted.) In a film that showed its protagonist trying to be the positive change he wants to see on Earth, Kara’s brash attitude towards the end a) added comic relief while b) letting you know that heroes come in many forms.
Supergirl finds Kara a year later, still getting wasted, but now trying to figure out what it all means.
Supergirl is the second film in James Gunn’s DC Universe
2025’s Superman, marked the official “soft reboot” of the DC Extended Universe into the DC Universe, with Superman setting up a world that would obviously connect to Supergirl, the body horror Clayface film that’s set to be released October 23, 2026, the 2027 Superman and Lex Luthor team-up film Man of Tomorrow, as well as John Cena’s Peacemaker, the upcoming Lanterns HBO series (which debuts August 16, 2026), and other rumored projects. Supergirl is a part of the initial batch of DC Universe projects, dubbed Chapter One: Gods and Monsters.
Supergirl is directed by Craig Gillespie
The Australian-born filmmaker should be familiar to modern audiences; Gillespie has directed everything from Kid Cudi’s “No One Believes In Me” music video to Altoids commercials to 2017’s I, Tonya, 2021’s Cruella, and episodes of the 2025 Apple TV+ series Your Friends & Neighbors. Word is that, with both James Gunn and Gillespie seeing Kara’s character as an “antihero,” Gillespie’s track record of crafting films with unconventional women in the lead may have been what won him the gig.
“It was the first time I've actually read a superhero script [where] for me I could understand the tone and what to do with it,” Gillespie says. “I was all in. Milly had already been cast, and that combination—that script with Milly, with [DC Studios] overseeing it… Because the script goes to some very dark and hard places for the character, and I felt like [they] would double down on that. Milly, tonally, was perfect for it. She's got this vulnerability and this humor and this accessibility, but the strength and this seraphic nature that's built into her DNA, that was perfect. The whole combination.”
Supergirl is based on a 2021 DC Supergirl miniseries
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow ran from June 2021 to February 2022, telling a tale where Kara meets (and ultimately decides to help) a young girl named Ruthye, who is on a quest to avenge her father’s death, seeking to kill Krem of the Yellow Hills.
While at one point Supergirl actually had the ‘: Woman of Tomorrow’ in its title, this film does make changes to the well-received miniseries, which has been compared to the iconic Sandman. The biggest change might be the addition of Jason Momoa as Lobo (himself an anticipated DC Comics character) to the cast. Why? It actually mirrors Tom King’s original idea for the series, which was to be a play on the 1968 novel True Grit, with Kara being the Mattie Ross to Lobo’s Rooster Cogburn. (One has to imagine that this easily sets up a future Lobo solo film for DC.)
Krem of the Yellow Hills is a real POS
In Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Krem is a low-down dog of an individual. Not only did he stab and kill Ruthye’s father (after her father didn’t laugh at a joke he told), but Krem is part of a genocidal group of beasts known as Barbond's Brigands. Linking up with this squad is what, unfortunately, gave Krem all the tools he needed to further develop into the psychopath Ruthye is trying to eliminate. Without getting too spoiler-y (for the comics or the film), Krem is the kind of bastard who will stop at nothing to degrade (and delete) his enemies.
Early Supergirl reviews and box office projections aren’t promising
At the time of this writing, Supergirl is sitting at a 57 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, although praise has been given to Alcock’s Kara / Supergirl, Momoa as Lobo, and the film does do a lot of worldbuilding around what happened on planet Krypton and in the city Kara grew up in, Argo. "It's so fundamental to who she is as a person and what she goes through in her formative years there,” Gillespie told EW. “It makes you understand why she is where she is with her personality and the self-destructive nature that she has as we meet her at the beginning of the film."
The way that Supergirl’s brief appearance at the end of Superman last year had the masses hype, it will be interesting to see what the Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes ends up being; more important for DC will be how this film performs at the box office. The initial projections of a $55 million opening weekend have been curbed a bit, with new estimates around $40 million. The Flash opened at $55 million in 2023, and the film is widely seen as a dud. Supergirl will reportedly need to make $315 million worldwide just to break even, which is always a possibility if audiences fall in love with the film.
Hopefully, for Kara’s sake, they don’t treat Supergirl like box office kryptonite.
