DC has been building toward something special, and Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow might be the film that proves James Gunn’s new DCU is ready to stand on its own. The first trailer has arrived — and it is not what anyone expected. This isn’t the bright, cheerful Supergirl of Saturday morning cartoons. This is something rawer, stranger, and considerably more interesting: a space western in the tradition of True Grit, with a Kryptonian woman on a murderous quest for justice across the galaxy.
Milly Alcock is Kara Zor-El. Jason Momoa is Lobo. And the film opens in theaters on June 26, 2026. Here’s everything you need to know.
The Trailer: What We Saw and Why It Works
The trailer opens with Kara using the power-dampening effects of red sunlight to get drunk on alien planets — picking up directly from where audiences left her at the end of James Gunn’s Superman. She’s celebrating her 23rd birthday across the galaxy with her dog Krypto, deliberately stripping herself of her powers to feel something human, something ordinary. It’s a striking, vulnerable image for a character who has traditionally been portrayed as optimistic and invulnerable.
Then things go wrong. A chance encounter with a young girl named Ruthye Marye Knoll (Eve Ridley) — seeking revenge for the murder of her father at the hands of the criminal Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts) — pulls Kara into a story that isn’t hers. She didn’t have to get involved. She gets involved anyway. Blondie’s “Call Me” plays over the footage, and somehow it’s perfect.
The visual language is unlike anything in the DCU to date. This isn’t Metropolis. This isn’t Earth. This is the galaxy — alien landscapes, frontier justice, cosmic scale with deeply personal stakes. Director Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya, Cruella) has always excelled at finding humanity inside outsized genre stories, and Woman of Tomorrow looks like his biggest canvas yet.
Milly Alcock: The Right Choice at the Right Time
Before anything else: Milly Alcock is extraordinary in this footage. The Australian actress — best known as young Rhaenyra Targaryen in House of the Dragon — brings something to Kara Zor-El that’s been missing from virtually every previous iteration of the character: complexity. This is not the sunny, uncomplicated cousin of Superman. This is a woman shaped by loss, by the knowledge that she survived Krypton when she wasn’t supposed to, by the existential weight of being the last memory of a dead world.
Alcock plays Kara as someone who has chosen to feel smaller than she is — getting drunk under red suns, wandering the galaxy without purpose — and then finds, through Ruthye’s quest, a reason to be what she actually is. The arc is rich. The performance, even in a two-minute trailer, is already doing the heavy lifting.
She was introduced briefly in Gunn’s Superman, but this is her film. And based on what the trailer shows, she owns every second of it.
Jason Momoa as Lobo: The Wildcard
If casting Milly Alcock was the smart choice, casting Jason Momoa as Lobo is the inspired one. Lobo — the foul-mouthed, unkillable, motorcycle-riding interstellar bounty hunter — is one of DC’s most anarchic characters, a deliberate parody of ’90s excess who has somehow endured as a genuine fan favorite for decades.
Momoa is Lobo. Physically, energetically, temperamentally — the man was built for this role. After years of playing Aquaman with a certain grounded charm, the chance to fully unleash as the Main Man appears to have given him something to really sink his teeth into. The trailer hints at a dynamic between Lobo and Kara that’s equal parts antagonistic and reluctantly collaborative — the kind of odd-couple energy that great genre films live and die by.
This is also Momoa’s second appearance in the DCU, firmly establishing that he’s part of Gunn’s new universe rather than a relic of the old one. The transition looks seamless.
The Source Material: Why “True Grit in Space” Works
Writer Ana Nogueira’s screenplay adapts Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s eight-issue comic series of the same name — one of the most critically acclaimed superhero comics of the last decade. King’s story uses Kara as a Rooster Cogburn analogue, consciously evoking the structure and moral texture of Charles Portis’ True Grit: an older, world-weary guide accompanying a young woman on a quest for justice that has no clean ending.
The brilliance of the comics was in how King used Ruthye as the narrator — we see Kara entirely through the eyes of this young girl who doesn’t fully understand her, which makes Kara simultaneously mythic and flawed. That perspective creates emotional distance and intimacy at the same time. If Gillespie and Nogueira preserve even a fraction of that structural genius, the film will be something genuinely special.
Evely’s art in the comics was breathtaking — alien worlds rendered with extraordinary detail and beauty. The trailer suggests the film has matched that visual ambition.
The Villain: Krem of the Yellow Hills
Matthias Schoenaerts plays Krem, the man who murdered Ruthye’s father and set the entire story in motion. It’s a casting choice that speaks to the film’s tonal seriousness — Schoenaerts is a heavyweight character actor (Rust and Bone, A Bigger Splash) who doesn’t do cartoonish villainy. Krem will presumably be a fully realized antagonist with comprehensible motivations, not just an obstacle for the hero to punch.
The interplay between Krem, Ruthye, and Kara forms the moral core of the story: what does justice actually mean across the galaxy, when there’s no court, no law, and no one to appeal to except yourself and whatever power you happen to carry?
Where It Fits in the DCU
Gunn’s Superman established the tone and values of the new DCU: hopeful, earnest, grounded in human emotion despite cosmic scale. Woman of Tomorrow takes those values and tests them in a much harsher environment — the frontier of space, where hope is a luxury and survival is the baseline.
The fact that Kara’s story is explicitly connected to Clark’s — she appears at the end of his film, she’s discussed in relation to the Superman mythology — means this isn’t a standalone curiosity. It’s a deliberate expansion of the DCU’s emotional universe, exploring what it means to be Kryptonian from a fundamentally different angle.
June 26, 2026 is when we find out if that expansion pays off. Based on the trailer? It’s going to.
Final Verdict: DC’s Boldest Swing Yet
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is not the film anyone would have predicted from DC two years ago. It’s weird and specific and emotionally demanding in ways that mainstream superhero films rarely attempt. It has a director who makes bold choices, an actress delivering a career-defining performance before the film even opens, and source material that represents the best of what superhero comics can do as a literary form.
DC rebranded Superman Day as Supergirl Day this year. That’s not just marketing. That’s a statement of intent. Kara Zor-El is the face of the new DCU’s 2026, and Woman of Tomorrow looks ready to justify that confidence completely.
Mark your calendars. June 26, 2026.
