The new trailer for James Gunn’s 2026 “Supergirl” movie has dropped, pulling the heartstrings of anyone who loved Krypto in 2025’s “Superman” and highlighting how very different this incarnation of the namesake character is from iterations in other media.

This Supergirl (first seen in an after-credits scene in Superman) is based on “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow,” a 2020–2021 comic miniseries. Kara Zor-El, unlike her more famous cousin, remembers not only the death of the planet Krypton but also its death throes. Unlike the infant Clark Kent/Kal-El, she didn’t leave the dying planet until she was forced to as an older teen, and it makes her an intrinsically different character from everyone’s favorite superpowered Boy Scout (played by David Corenswet).

Milly Alcock’s Kara is traumatized and scruffy, finding joy only in her dog—and, OK, maybe a bit in escaping Earth to drink in off-world dive bars (where red suns allow her to feel intoxication) and hide from everything, including the aforementioned hero.

“Well, that’s the thing, Clark,” she replies to a concerned video message from that earnest cousin. “I have no people.” Neither does she particularly seem to want them. Just a girl and her dog, playing fetch in space and hiding from agonizing memories, as one does.

But things change—of course they do—when Kara’s aimless, restless drifting brings her into the orbit of young Ruthye Marye Knoll (played by Eve Ridley) and her quest to avenge her father’s death. Kara is unimpressed and uninterested—until Krypto is caught in the crossfire.

(This is a John Wick-level mistake for any number of people.)

The trailer mixes Kara and Ruthye’s multi-planet quest to find Krem of the Yellow Hills (played by Matthias Schoenaerts) interspersed with Kara’s youth and her memories of Krypton, its slow, painful death, and the loss of her own parents (David Krumholtz and Emily Beecham).

Alcock’s Kara is damaged, flippant, and absolutely bad-ass in the trailer’s action sequences; Ridley’s Ruthye is an earnest tagalong in the longstanding tradition of buddy movies. Schoenaerts is mainly unrecognizable under heavy makeup/protheses, but he oozes malice as the leader of the Brigands, a planet-hopping band of war criminals.

Jason Momoa returns to DC movies (after seven years as Arthur Curry/Aquaman) to play the bounty hunter and mercenary Lobo with a dose of needed humor. That character doesn’t appear in the source miniseries but has been a part of DC since 1983; Momoa brings his usual zeal to the antihero role.

“Supergirl” hits theaters June 26, 2026. It’s directed by Craig Gillespie, produced by Gunn and Peter Safran and written by Ana Nogueira.

The movie is part of the DCU’s Chapter One: Gods and Monsters, following “Superman” and preceding “Clayface” (October 23, 2026) and “Man of Tomorrow” (planned for July 2027).

About the writer

Jill Keppeler is a writer and editor from Buffalo, N.Y. She’s an avid reader who has really has far too much comic book and sci-fi lore taking up space in her brain.