‘Supergirl’ Sets Streaming Premiere Date

Mark your calendars DC fans: Supergirl is coming home.

No, not to Krypton. Or even to the ruins of Argo City. She’s headed to HBO Max. The latest DC Comics movie will premiere there for streaming next week. (Do you think Argo City had streaming movies while it was floating through space for years? I hope so. Can you imagine decades without access to the Criterion Channel? Brutal!)

Milly Alcock stars in the film, which is based on the recent DC comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow by writer Tom King and artist Bilquis Evely. In both the movie and the comic, Kara Zor-El joins forces with an alien girl named Ruthye (Eve Ridley) seeking revenge for the murder of her family at the hands of a brutal killer, Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthas Schoenaerts).

Supergirl was one of my most anticipated movies of the summer, based in large part on my love of the source material. (Seriously — if you haven’t read Woman of Tomorrow, seek it out.) At least for me, the film did not live up to the book. As I wrote in my review here at ScreenCrush, it felt less like the novel than an attempt to reconfigure this character and this story into a vehicle for a copycat of DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn’s Marvel movie Guardians of the Galaxy...

Guardians (and Gunn’s Superman, for that matter) found the right combination of action, humor, and heart, a formula that felt like an authentic expression of its director’s idiosyncratic worldview. In its forced and calculated attempt to recreate that aesthetic, Supergirl lands somewhere closer to Guardians’ inferior copycats, like 2016’s abysmal Suicide Squad. Given the splash Alcock made in Superman,and the fact that Supergirl is based on one of the best books DC Comics has published in the last decade,this has to be one of the biggest disappointments in recent superhero movie history.

But that’s just my opinion. Streaming allows for sampling at a much lower cost than a movie ticket. So if you want to check out Supergirl for yourself, it premieres on HBO Max on September 10.