Before Supergirl ever reached theaters, thousands of people had already decided whether it deserved to succeed. That’s a strange way to experience stories. Somewhere along the line, we stopped letting movies surprise us and started treating them like arguments we were expected to win.

I saw Supergirl this weekend. I thought it was very good. And I think the fact that I feel compelled to explain myself — to hedge, to pre-apologize, to brace for the eye-rolls — says something worth examining.

The Verdict That Came Before the Film

In the weeks leading up to its June 26th release, Supergirl became a referendum before it was ever a movie. The discourse moved fast, as it always does now. The box office projections dropped from $55 million to $40 million before a single ticket was punched. Comment sections were already writing the post-mortem. YouTube thumbnails were asking if DC had already “failed again.” Hot takes were being published before critics had finished writing their reviews.

This is the pattern. We know it because we’ve watched it play out over and over. A film gets announced. A trailer drops. The algorithm surfaces the most outraged reactions. Those reactions attract engagement. Engagement gets mistaken for consensus. And by the time opening weekend arrives, the cultural narrative has already been written — and the film itself is almost beside the point.

What kind of movie did people refuse to see? One they had already decided was a flop. One they had emotionally pre-rejected because rejecting things publicly has become its own form of social currency.

What Happens When We Decide Before We Watch

There’s a specific kind of unfairness in arriving at a story with the verdict already in hand. It’s not a matter of lowering or raising expectations — we all do that. It’s something more like refusal. A decision, made in advance, not to be moved.

When you decide a film is bad before the opening credits roll, you stop watching it and start auditing it. Every flaw confirms what you already knew. Every strength becomes a suspicious anomaly. You’re no longer a viewer. You’re a prosecutor.

I’m a lifelong DC fan. I grew up with the Christopher Reeve Superman films. I watched Smallville from its premiere to its finale and have strong feelings about nearly every season. I say that not to establish credentials, but to acknowledge that I walked into Supergirl with some emotional investment and also some fatigue. DC’s film history over the past decade has not always been kind to those of us who care about these characters. Skepticism, for fans like me, is not irrational.

But skepticism and predetermination are different things. One keeps you honest. The other closes the door before the movie starts.

Supergirl is not a perfect film. I want to be clear about that. The villain, Krem of the Yellow Hills, is somewhat underdeveloped despite Matthias Schoenaerts’s committed performance. Some of the action sequences feel rushed in a way that dulls their impact. There are moments where the film’s ambitions outrun its execution. These are fair criticisms, and the mixed reviews it has received are not baseless.

But here is what is also true: Supergirl is a genuinely interesting piece of genre filmmaking. It has something to say, and it finds unusual ways to say it. And Milly Alcock delivers a performance that absolutely justifies the faith placed in her.

What the Film Is Actually About

Supergirl is adapted from Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s acclaimed eight-issue comic book miniseries Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which ran from 2021 to 2022. The source material was already something special — an Eisner Award-nominated space western that approached Kara Zor-El as a woman shaped by genuine loss, not just potential. The premise is deceptively simple: Kara, traveling through space on her 23rd birthday, gets tangled up with a grieving young girl named Ruthye who is hunting the man who killed her father. What follows is essentially a road movie set across alien worlds, written from Ruthye’s perspective, asking hard questions about grief, justice, and what heroism actually costs.

The film retains that emotional core while adapting it to a three-act structure that director Craig Gillespie described as drawing from True Grit, Logan, and John Wick. Those are not arbitrary comparisons. Like Logan, Supergirl is primarily concerned with a hero who has been worn down by the universe and must find a reason to show up anyway. Like True Grit, it centers a fierce young girl who refuses to let grief become paralysis — and whose narrating voice gives the hero’s journey a perspective that makes it feel earned.

These are not new ideas. But sincerity, well-executed, does not require novelty.

The Problem With Irony as a Default

We have trained ourselves — or been trained by the internet — to treat enthusiasm as naïveté. Somewhere in the last fifteen years, earnestness became embarrassing. Enjoying something uncritically became evidence of poor taste. And the influencer economy, which rewards strong reactions above all else, has made cynicism the safest creative posture. You can’t be wrong if you hate everything. You can’t be embarrassed if nothing surprises you.

This cultural posture has consequences for the stories we tell and the ones we allow ourselves to receive. Films that reach for something sincere — hope, kindness, grief treated as grief rather than as a character quirk — get punished for trying. The moment a superhero story dares to be emotionally direct, the most common response online is mockery of its earnestness.

Supergirl is a film that takes its own themes seriously. Kara Zor-El is not a fun, quippy hero who bounces through setpieces. She is someone who watched her world die, who carries that loss in her body, who has spent years refusing to fully commit to being the hero everyone expects her to be. The film’s central tension is about earning that commitment — choosing, finally, to show up for something beyond yourself. When Kara eventually does put on the cape, it means something. Not because the movie tells you it should mean something, but because it has spent ninety minutes showing you why it does.

That kind of emotional work requires an audience that is willing to be worked on. And increasingly, we are not.

On Hope and the Courage to Enjoy Things Publicly

There’s a version of cultural engagement where sincerity is protected. Where saying “I liked that” is not an invitation for someone to explain why your taste is wrong. Where the fact that something moved you is treated as data worth taking seriously, not a vulnerability to be exploited.

We don’t live in that version right now. We live in one where every public expression of enjoyment comes with an implicit cost-benefit analysis. Is this the kind of thing I’m allowed to like? Will people think less of me for liking it? Have the right people approved of this yet?

Optimism gets treated as naïveté online because naïveté is associated with being fooled, and being fooled is associated with weakness. To hope that something will be good is to risk being disappointed. And disappointment, apparently, is more than we can tolerate. Better to arrive already disappointed. Better to be proven right than to be surprised.

But here’s the thing about Supergirl — it’s actually a film about exactly this. Kara Zor-El is a character who has every reason to be done with hope. Her planet is gone. Her people are dead. She was sent to protect a cousin who didn’t need her. She exists, for most of the film, in a kind of willful emotional suspension — not cruel, not broken, but not present either. Ruthye, the grieving girl who forces herself into Kara’s journey, is the one who refuses to let that suspension stand. Ruthye’s grief is active and demanding. It requires something of the people around her. It requires Kara to show up.

I think that’s what good stories do. They require something of us. They ask us to be present, to be moved, to let the thing that is happening on screen matter to us in the moment we are watching it. The refusal to be present — the armor of pre-formed cynicism — is a way of protecting yourself from stories. It is also a way of ensuring that no story can ever fully reach you.

A Few More Things Worth Saying

Milly Alcock is excellent. I knew her only from House of the Dragon, which she has earned considerable praise for. Here, she plays Kara with a kind of contained electricity — you always feel the power beneath the surface, the grief behind the attitude, the hero waiting to decide whether to emerge. It’s a performance that has room to grow in future films, which is exactly what you want from a new franchise centerpiece.

Eve Ridley, as Ruthye, is also a genuine discovery. Her point-of-view gives the film an almost literary quality, and her scenes with Alcock carry more emotional weight than the film’s detractors seem willing to credit.

Jason Momoa as Lobo is exactly what you would expect, which is not a criticism. The character is broad and loud and entertaining, and Momoa clearly understands the assignment. Whether his presence distracts from the more intimate story at the film’s center is a fair question — but he is fun, and fun is not nothing.

The film is not Superman (2025). It does not share that film’s sunlit warmth or its almost defiant optimism about human goodness. Supergirl earns its darker palette because Kara has earned her darkness. The two films make an interesting pair precisely because they present two versions of what Kryptonian heroism can look like — one shaped by a loving childhood on Earth, one shaped by watching everyone you know die by inches.

What We Owe Stories

I said at the start that thousands of people decided this film’s fate before they saw it. Some of them will turn out to be right in their assessment of the film’s quality. Plenty of movies that are pre-dismissed do, in fact, warrant dismissal. Box office performance can reflect genuine audience disinterest, not just manufactured narrative.

But the decision itself — the one made before watching, before sitting in the dark and letting the story try — that decision costs us something. It costs us the possibility of surprise. Of being moved by something we didn’t expect to be moved by. Of walking out of a theater feeling something we didn’t feel walking in.

Supergirl will not be the film of the year. It will not save or doom the DCU. It is a moderately flawed, frequently compelling, emotionally serious superhero film that deserves a fair hearing. It has something to say about grief and heroism and what it means to choose kindness in a universe that has not been particularly kind to you. Those are not small things.

The courage to enjoy something publicly — to say “yes, this worked for me, this moved me, I’m glad I saw it” — is something the internet has made feel riskier than it should be. I’m saying it anyway.

I liked Supergirl. It’s not perfect. Go see it and let it try.

Supergirl is rated PG-13 and is currently in theaters.