Supergirl Trailer Stuffed With Surprises
The first teaser trailer for the upcoming DC Studios movie Supergirl just landed and much of it was quite surprising — to me anyway. The first surprise was that it is not directed by James Gunn. I should have known that, since I follow Gunn and DC on most social media platforms and I’ve seen plenty of posts about Supergirl, but I thought, right until the end of my first viewing of the trailer, that Gunn was the director.
It turns out the director is Australian Craig Gillespie, whose work includes Lars and the Real Girl, The Finest Hours and I, Tonya. And you can see it isn’t a Gunn-directed movie in many of the shots in this teaser. The close-up early on of Milly Alcock as Kara waking up from sleep isn’t shot like anything I’ve seen in any Gunn film. Which isn’t to say Gunn’s touch is not blatantly apparent. The overall design aesthetic — particularly of the antagonist aliens — would be at home in any of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Which is interesting, since neither the Production Designer Neil Lamont nor Art Director Alastair Bullock have ever worked with Gunn as far as I can tell from IMdb.com. But they both worked on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and many of the Harry Potter films.
Another big surprise is that Supergirl wasn’t written by Gunn. The end of the teaser notes the writer as Ana Nogueira, and actress known for The Vampire Diaries and the excellent series Hightown, set and filmed in Provincetown, Mass. She did write and star in a short film in 2018, We Win. I haven’t seen it, but it must be pretty good for Gunn to give the second live action project in his new DC Studios reign to Nogueira, an otherwise complete unknown as a writer. Based on what we see and hear in the new teaser, it seems like Nogueira has some chops, at least with dialogue.
Part of the credit for that has to go to Alcock as Supergirl. I knew she was a talented actress from her work in the HBO series House of the Dragon, but I wasn’t blown away by any of her performances in that show. But her delivery of her hungover waking up line in the above-mentioned scene is so real, I felt I could have been listening to any one of my friends when we would wake up from a bender in our 20s. All of her lines in this teaser are delivered with a sense of real depth of emotion.
One surprise not very big is that we get our first look at Jason Momoa as the intergalactic bounty hunter Lobo. While I am eager to see what he does with the character that seems like someone went back in time just to base him on Momoa, the casting is that obvious and perfect, I hope he is a small part of the movie. I don’t want his presence to detract from one of the best comic book stories in decades. The teaser ends with a recommendation for people to buy and read the comic book series the movie is based closely on, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, written by Tom King and gorgeously illustrated by Bilquis Everly.
There is almost nothing in the teaser trailer that will spoil the story of Supergirl, aside from some mentions of how dark her backstory is, at least compared to her Kansas farm boy cousin Superman. So, feel free to watch it knowing the movie will still surprise you, like the teaser surprised me. Supergirl lands at theaters June 26, 2026.
