Supergirl (2026) is a fun movie. My brother Nate said he had a good time watching Supergirl while drinking some rum. Though I had no rum, I finally enjoyed watching Supergirl too.

But I did finish the movie wondering how much better it could have been.

I don’t want to yuck your yum. I’m not here to keep anyone from delighting in Supergirl. There are people who so valorize critique that they lose access to delight—or keep others from finding delight for themselves. I don’t want to be one of those people.

Supergirl is good surface-level fun with a few hints at something deeper. I get stuck on those hints though. The more I think about it, the more I wonder “how did this movie miss so much of its potential?”

I’m not trying to throw anyone under the bus. Making a movie is hard. It’s messy. Movies are collaborations between writers, actors, directors, and editors (plus all the other crew and technical experts). There are often too many cooks in the kitchen even before producers and other people with influence over the production pressure the movie to be changed in one way or another. I can’t and won’t point to any specific role having screwed up here, because I don’t know enough to say what happened.

I can say that Supergirl had all the right ingredients for several really excellent movies. There were at least two good character arcs available with Ruthye and Kara Zor-El (aka Supergirl). Ruthye’s revenge quest could have been its own movie, with a supporting appearance from Supergirl driving Ruthye’s development. Kara Zor-El’s turn as a slightly-less-grim John Wick (the dog doesn’t die) could have driven its own story with or without Ruthye. I would have watched that! With the two of them, there were compelling emotional throughlines and fun opportunities for the characters to play off each other.

But the ingredients didn’t quite come together. Somehow the movie’s combination of these characters, which should have amplified all the shared good stuff, instead caused destructive interference. It’s like taking everything you need for a delicious stew, cooking it all, and producing something that is merely fine.

It’s okay, but it’s a little disappointing.

By the way, *SPOILERS* abound after this for Supergirl (2026). I also talk about the beginning of Superman (2025), but not much more than that.

I think Supergirl was unsure of its core. Was the movie’s focus Ruthye’s revenge? Was it Kara’s race to save her dog Krypto, the one happy thing she has left to remember her now-dead home? Was it Kara’s need for some other positive force in her life? Was the focus on Kara’s need to prevent Ruthye from falling into a cycle of violent revenge that would stain her life, or on Ruthye’s experience as a survivor of violence, or on Ruthye’s need to rebuild her life around the hole left by her murdered family? Was the focus on Kara coming to terms with her own place in cycles of violence?

Each of those elements was present. Each one required slightly different exposition, background, and establishing work to give it weight in the story. Some of them got that work. Others didn’t.

Ideally, each of those elements and each element’s establishing work would build together to a larger whole. Instead, because of how that material was presented, each of those pieces competed with each other for focus and space in the narrative. It didn’t feel like the movie consistently prioritized and focused on any one of them.

At first I thought the solution might have been to steal expository tricks from Superman (2025), but Supergirl faced a harder narrative task than Superman did.

Superman’s (2025) introduction was genius. In a minute and a half, it gave us all the background and context that we needed. It accomplished that with about one minute of simple text, landscape shots, and stirring music—plus roughly thirty seconds of Superman looking like he’d been given a makeover by a meat tenderizer.

Superman could do that because its creators were confident that enough people already knew Superman. That intro could set up multiple interesting questions: how did Superman lose? Did losing change who Superman was? Could anything change who Superman was?

It helps that Superman’s basic backstory is extremely simple, and calls on clear enough tropes that presenting it quickly feels possible. Supergirl’s backstory in this movie (there have been multiple versions) is also pretty simple: she’s the last survivor of a dying people, a refugee without a place that feels like home, and is torn open by the conflict between her desire to die with her family and her parents’ desire that she thrive even as they perished. That’s very similar to Superman’s backstory, but comes with more complications. Worse, Supergirl doesn’t have the same widespread cultural familiarity—people are more likely to know her as “like Superman” rather than know her in her own right—making it even more important that we get some of her deeper context in the film.

So. Supergirl might have had trouble using an introduction as spare and tight as Superman’s simply because it had more work to do. But the problem runs deeper. Whose story is told when, and in how much detail, matters a lot for a narrative. That’s even more important in the compressed space of a movie. Supergirl shoots itself in the foot here.

When I finally had all the pieces of Kara’s story, it really got to me. Everything clicked. Her dying parents on her dying planetoid sent her to Earth in the desperate hope that her totally unknown cousin (Clark Kent aka Superman) could help her find a new home. But even with his warm welcome she couldn’t handle her loneliness, loss, sensory overload, and deep sadness. Krypto, her dog, was the only reminder of home that she still had.

The problem? The movie shared none of that until way too late. Worse, for most of the movie the depth of the narrative hooks we’re offered don’t match who gets the camera’s focus.

Here’s a basic guideline: movies are usually about the first characters you encounter, and they’re focused on whoever has a dramatic hook that pulls in the audience. Building on my point above about the movie’s core… who is Supergirl about?

We have two characters: Kara (Supergirl), and Ruthye (…somebody, I suppose).

Supergirl shows us Kara first, but gives her no dramatic hook or inciting event. Instead, we’re offered a montage of bar crawling and partying. It’s not totally clear what the emotional undertone is; it could be irresponsibility and pleasure-seeking, it could be avoidance, it could be boundary-pushing self-exploration.

Based on what we learn later, I’m pretty sure that Kara is looking for peaceful, inebriated oblivion. Emotionally, her dog is all she has. That makes sense. I feel for her. The problem is that we don’t actually know that yet. We won’t have all the puzzle pieces until over an hour into the movie.

By comparison, 4 minutes in Ruthye gets both a dramatic hook and an inciting event as her family is murdered right before her eyes. Then, Ruthye shows up in Kara’s next scene. Kara is given more focus from the camera both before and after Ruthye’s introduction, but we’re spoon-fed Ruthye’s dramatic backstory while we’re left guessing about Kara’s emotional state and narrative context.

Then Kara’s dog is poisoned. Kara is upset and vows to save her pooch, and the adventure kicks off. The camera tells us that Kara is the main character. Kara acts like the main character. Given what we learn later about her backstory, of course she’s the main character. She’s going to John Wick the stupid saps who poisoned the one thing she loves, the one reminder of home that she has left.

But from the background available in the script and established so far, Ruthye matters more. Kara’s dog was poisoned, sure, but that happened after Ruthye’s family was killed on screen right before her eyes (and ours). Kara’s narrative weight just doesn’t compare.

Only after 42 minutes of runtime does that begin to shift. All of Kara’s emotional context that I mentioned above? The first dose of that is delivered in a flashback around 42 minutes in, with two more chunks of flashback at 1 hour and 4 minutes and at 1 hour and 7 minutes. That last and most potent piece of Kara’s emotional puzzle arrives almost two thirds of the way through the movie! The script and the camera finally agree on who the main character is, but by this point the tone and focus has been set by Ruthye for so long that Kara’s narrative feels like a surprise addendum.

It’s damn confusing.

This is a big part of the missed potential that I mentioned. With a different introduction, we could understand all that background at the movie’s start—or we could understand enough of it that more depth could be added later. We could understand enough of Kara’s experience that her position as the main character kept its emotional resonance despite Ruthye’s dire straits and urgent need for help.

There’s another missed piece, though. It’s a smaller and more intimate one. It’s tied to Ruthye’s story, and the weird positions that Kara and Lobo (Jason Momoa’s cameo, not super important to the movie) play as Ruthye’s shoulder-angel and shoulder-devil respectively.

Throughout the story, Kara tells Ruthye that the revenge she’s seeking won’t get Ruthye what she wants—that it will actually hurt Ruthye, hurt her for the rest of her life. She refuses to help Ruthye get revenge. She accepts Ruthye’s company only because she also refuses to space the poor girl. Kara encourages Ruthye to abandon the idea of killing the man who killed her family.

Lobo, of course, encourages Ruthye to do some murder herself.

Eventually, at the climax of the movie, Kara says that Ruthye killing her family’s murderer is the wrong choice. Kara tells Ruthye that she would find a better revenge living a joyful life and forgetting about the murderer. Her delivery feels like she knows this personally, like she has already made that wrong choice herself or watched others torn apart by having made that wrong choice.

I think it is a good message (even if the movie establishes this particular baddie as someone who probably deserves to die). I have no problem with Kara giving that advice to Ruthye. The opposition between Kara and Lobo, while somewhat sidelined, is an important piece of Ruthye’s arc.

I’m most familiar with this argument—that a survivor’s best revenge is a life well-lived—in the context of surviving sexual violence. While Ruthye seeks vengeance for non-sexual violence (thanks for not using that old trope!), this conversation has heavy overtones of sexual violence. This makes sense in the moment.

See, the baddies have been kidnapping women and making them sex slaves in order to perpetuate their dying “all male” alien species. Kara and Ruthye’s dramatic conversation happens just after the climactic battle defeating the baddies. The now-freed women that Kara has (kind of incidentally) rescued are present and visible. The context of Kara’s message feels hard to miss.

So. Kara spends all her time telling Ruthye not to get violent revenge. This advice feels very personal. There’s emotional weight behind it, and she’s obviously glad when Ruthye finally agrees with her at the end of the movie. This feels like (and is) the culmination of Ruthye’s story.

Bizarrely, it feels like it’s supposed to be the culmination of Kara’s story too, even though her position on not taking violent revenge feels weirdly empty. It isn’t clearly motivated by anything from her backstory. Her position on murderous revenge doesn’t come across like a Clark Kent moral-rectitude-and-apple-pie thing, it’s just kind of there.

Then, when Ruthye’s not looking, Kara murders the baddie herself. That’s jarring.

I think it all still works. That’s what John Wick would do, and Kara’s story has quietly been John Wick all along. But because the movie has so far given me Kara’s actions and then given me her emotional context I kept expecting to learn why Kara made this choice, or at least to see her justify it to herself. I never did. We never get a clue about Kara’s experience here. She doesn’t even say something like, “Nobody fucks with my dog.”

Given the passion with which she opposed Ruthye killing the baddie just minutes earlier, this feels weird. I’m left wondering whether she has already committed vengeful murder, whether she’s decided that she’s fine with doing some more, and why she’s decided that the baddie needs to die. It’s not that Kara’s choice feels unmotivated, but that her decision is the opposite of her message across the entire movie. It feels inconsistent.

To be clear: I don’t need to see Kara being a survivor of sexual violence. I don’t need to see her previous murderous revenge. But if she’s going to indulge in revenge murder after saying that Ruthye shouldn’t do it, I want to know more about why. Nothing in what we’ve been told of her backstory suggests that she’s had any prior murder-worthy revenge—-if anything, it seems like her life has been good, safe, and tragic up to this point without any obvious killing of anybody.

This is one of those moments where I think I see the several different movies that Supergirl might have been. They’re all overlaid here, but we’re only able to see bits and pieces of each. That’s why this narrative dissonance lingers; the scenes we’re given assume that some other movie, some deleted scene, came before, and that we have some other context for this climax. We’ve actually been watching several different movies stitched together this entire time, without all the pieces having been lined up to pull the narrative in a final unified direction.

That’s the missed opportunity.

I enjoyed this movie. It was fun. Maybe you’ll be able to see the seams too.