Milly Alcock’s Woman of Tomorrow makes her official entrance with the first teaser trailer for Supergirl, and it’s clear this isn’t your cousin’s Kryptonian. Set to Blondie’s “Call Me,” the footage wastes no time in establishing a radically different take from the Man of Steel, with Kara Zor-El passed out in a cluttered trailer van while her dog Krypto pees on a discarded Daily Planet newspaper showcasing her cousin Superman’s exploits on Earth.
It’s a far cry from Metropolis’ golden boy as this is a superpowered alien who parties hard and fights harder, but isn’t particularly interested in saving anyone.
Prior to the trailer drop, DC Studios’ James Gunn and Supergirl director Craig Gillespie (Cruella) discussed the highly anticipated feature length introduction to the Maid of Might at an exclusive Q&A session with Alcock (House of the Dragon) that Geek Culture attended. While the character had a small cameo in Superman (2025), this reintroduction of his cousin also offers fans a glimpse at what’s to come in DC Studios’ second film under its rebooted universe. Supergirl is based on the critically acclaimed Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (2021-2022) comic by Tom King and Bilquis Evely, and judging by the trailer, it holds tightly to the graphic novel’s core ethos that embraces anger, trauma, and recklessness just as much as strength, hope, and redemption.
Gunn’s admiration for King’s Woman of Tomorrow had already put Kara on his internal wishlist and even before he officially took over DC Studios with Peter Safran, he remembers pointing to that book and saying he wanted to adapt it due to the “interesting take it was on the character of Supergirl”.
“At the end of the day, everything we do at DC is story-driven, and I loved [Ana Nogueira]’s script, but also, unlike Wonder Woman, The Flash, or Aquaman, Supergirl is not someone who we’ve seen on the big screen for a long, long time,” Gunn adds. In 1984, Warner Brothers released the widely-panned Supergirl starring Helen Slater as the Girl of Steel, regarded as the fourth film in the Christopher Reeve Superman film series, set after the events of Superman III (1983).
Gillespie came to the project with a clear sense of how to make Kara’s world feel distinct and drawing from King’s comic and Nogueira’s screenplay, Gillespie built a tone that leans into moral ambiguity and emotional messiness rather than clean, golden-age heroism. His filmography has often centred on flawed outsiders, and he sees Kara as another character dragging around a loaded past.
“She’s got a lot of demons, a lot of baggage, and she’s not dealing with it at the beginning of the film,” says Gillespie. “It’s a wonderful place for an actor to start, to be able to draw on that, and be broken in that way, and then figure it out.”
Rather than placing Kara in Superman’s shadow, Supergirl launches her on a solo journey through the cosmos. With Krypto in tow, Kara begins her 21st birthday drunk on an alien planet, clearly attempting to outrun Krypton’s past and her own emotional fallout. Neon signage, crowded bars and aliens give the footage a strong Guardians of the Galaxy-style energy, all swagger and space grime. Her drifting comes to a halt when she crosses paths with Ruthye Marye Knoll (Eve Ridley, 3 Body Problem), a young alien girl who’s on a revenge mission after witnessing the murder of her father.
Kara, despite her reluctance, agrees to help, especially after Krypto gets hurt. Along the way, they attract the attention of bounty hunters and go head-to-head with the villainous Krem of the Yellow Hills, played by Matthias Schoenaerts (The Old Guard).
Kara doesn’t wear the Supergirl suit until the final part of the trailer and that because she’s not the symbol her cousin represents and she’s not even trying to be a hero.
“Kara’s strength is that she doesn’t mask behind her abilities in this journey that we watch her go on,” Alcock explains. “She has to become the hero of her own story.”
“We kind of start backwards. She’s like the opposite. She’s an anti-hero. She doesn’t want the role, doesn’t want to be a hero. Most of the movies with female-led heroes have been pretty much perfect badasses. Supergirl is not that. She’s reluctant. And I don’t think she wants to necessarily wear that costume. She is her own thing.”
What sets this Supergirl apart, in Alcock’s eyes, is how recognisable Kara feels beneath the heat vision. “She was written so incredibly grounded, and a person that we can all understand and empathise with. She’s incredibly flawed. She’s messy.”
Alcock treated King’s Woman of Tomorrow comics as a “bible” for this particular iteration of Kara. On top of that, she committed to months of stunt training and conditioning, waking up at 5:30 am to build the strength and stamina needed for wire-heavy sequences. Filming often required her to learn complex fights in fifteen minutes before stepping into one-minute takes, “spinning and fighting with eight guys on ratchets that are flying around”.
“There are these big set pieces, and all the action sequences can be a lot. But at the end of the day, every time I turn the camera on Millie [Alcock], she grounds it,” Gillespie explains. “There’s this humanity, vulnerability, humour, and strength to her. The character, as written, played so well to her strengths.”
Supergirl arrives at a key moment for DC, marking Kara’s first solo film since 1984, and follows a lineage that includes Melissa Benoist’s long-running CW series (2016-2021), Sasha Calle’s appearance in The Flash (2023) and Meg Donnelly’s recent animated voice work. Alcock leads a cast that includes Jason Momoa (Aquaman) as the space mercenary Lobo, with David Krumholtz (Numb3rs) and Emily Beecham (Into the Badlands) appearing as Kara’s parents Zor-El and Alura In-Ze.
Taken together, the trailer promises a film that blends bruising, GOTG-style cosmic chaos with a surprisingly intimate character study of a woman who has no interest in being anyone’s hero but becomes one anyway.
As Gillespie puts it, audiences should brace themselves for a Supergirl who’s “so kick-ass and owns who she is in an unapologetic way – a character that isn’t trying to conform to anything, that just plays by her own rules and defines herself on her terms.”
Look out, Supergirl soars into theatres on 25 June 2026.
Natalie is a big fan of anything related to movies, TV shows, and anime — you name it. When she’s not reading or being a dedicated cinephile, she’s probably playing gacha and tabletop games, or daydreaming of Caleb from Love and Deepspace.
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