Supergirl Suddenly Feels Redeemed On Streaming
Should this have been a streaming show instead of a movie?
Today, there’s a lot of pressure on theatrical films in the sci-fi/fantasy/or comic book genres. We tend to call these movies “blockbusters” before they’ve made enough money to truly bust some blocks. And when a big-budget superhero movie falters, the commentary around those missteps sometimes replaces the experience of watching the movie itself. But here’s the thing with Supergirl: while not a great movie, the truth is, had this meant just one part of a direct-to-streaming miniseries, or even part of a bigger arc on the old Arrowverse CW version of a DC shared universe, the pressure would have been off, and thus, Supergirl could have gotten away with something like that somewhat cloying cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle.”
To put it a bit more simply, when you watch Supergirl on streaming — and it’s just hit HBO Max — all of its problems, and all the things its harshest critics lambasted it for, feel somewhat overblown. If you squint and just imagine that Supergirl wasn’t designed as a big, theatrical summer movie, but instead a rocky launch to a DCU streaming series, like Peacemaker or Lanterns, a lot of its shortcomings seem, if not absent, mostly forgivable. If you didn’t catch Supergirl in theaters, now’s the time to give it a chance on streaming, and imagine that this was where it started all along.
Mild spoilers ahead.
The best example of why Supergirl works better on the small screen than the big screen can be found in the question of the dog. In 2025, James Gunn pinned much of Superman’s (David Corenswet) anger on the abduction of the pup Krypto by Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). Weirdly enough, one summer later, we were right back in a similar situation with Supergirl, in which Kara (Milly Alcock) is often seemingly more outraged about Krypto than about the various people. While Gunn didn’t direct Supergirl (that would be Craig Gillespie), the tone of some of Gunn’s take on the DCU is present in Supergirl, too.
Now, while this is a strange way to anchor two back-to-back summer superhero films, if Supergirl had simply been another streaming DCU show, or the beginning of a miniseries (aren’t all these shows like miniseries now anyway?), the repetition of the Krypton-in-danger trope wouldn’t have been so bad.
Jason Momoa as Lobo
This is also true of the fact that Jason Momoa’s Lobo is very underused, and ultimately a glorified cameo. Had Supergirl been a 5-episode miniseries, and Lobo just showed up in one episode, no problem. If you were watching the movie on HBO Max right now, and you somehow avoided all the promotion and chatter about Momoa playing Lobo, you’d be happy to see him in this movie.
In fact, much of what seemed like a poor choice — like the now-infamous needle drop of “The Middle” — just scans as slightly goofy on the small screen. If Melissa Benoist’s Supergirl had spent a lot of time getting upset about Krypto and performed a wild action climax in one episode set to some other 1990s quasi-emo-band song, nobody would have really noticed, and certainly wouldn’t have gotten upset.
Milly Alcock flies into action in Supergirl.
Did the character of Supergirl deserve a massive big-screen extravaganza that didn’t feel like it was written for streaming TV? Yes, she certainly did. And, as many have pointed out, Alcock is a solid actress who is equally good in The House of the Dragon or even in the 2023 music video for Noel Gallagher’s song “Easy Now,” in which, interestingly enough, she flies. The point is, had the movie Supergirl just been a pilot episode, we could look forward to more of Alock in this role, and maybe, given time, get a bigger, more interesting story for her than the movie we got.
And perhaps, we still will. The expansion of superhero franchises has never been a straight line. Supergirl may not have soared at the box office, but perhaps it didn’t need to. Watching the movie on streaming won’t win over some of the movie’s biggest haters, but it will do something more interesting: Make us forget what all the fuss was about.
