Supergirl Comic vs Movie: How Woman of Tomorrow Remade Kara Zor-El
Supergirl has always lived in Superman’s shadow, and that is exactly what the new film refuses to do. Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl, released June 26, 2026 and starring Milly Alcock as Kara Zor-El, adapts Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s critically acclaimed 2021 miniseries Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and it understands one crucial thing from the start: Kara is not Clark Kent, and treating her like a female version of Superman would be a mistake. Clark was raised on Earth with love, stability and a clear moral foundation. Kara remembers Krypton. She remembers the destruction of her world, the loss of her family, and the pain of surviving something no one around her can fully understand. The comic made that difference its subject, and the film carries it over.
The source material is a cosmic road trip rather than a traditional superhero origin. In Woman of Tomorrow, Kara is travelling through space when she is pulled into a violent and emotional journey alongside Ruthye, a young girl seeking revenge for her father’s murder. That structure matters because it lets Kara be seen through someone else’s eyes: Ruthye puts her on a pedestal as a hero, while Kara herself is still trying to find her way out of a dark hole. The film follows that shape, with Eve Ridley as Ruthye, Matthias Schoenaerts, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham, David Corenswet and Jason Momoa in support, and a story driven by a personal tragedy that pushes Kara into a revenge mission across the galaxy.
The biggest change from the wider comics tradition is structural, and comic fans spotted it immediately. In the classic telling, Kara is the older cousin, sent from Krypton as a teenager ahead of Clark and trapped in suspended animation, arriving on Earth older in years but younger in experience. In Woman of Tomorrow, and in the film, that scaffolding is gone. This Kara is officially younger than Superman, born on the drifting, radioactive ruins of Argo City after Krypton’s main explosion, with no memory of his birth parents or their old world. Instead of a wholesome counterpart to Superman, the film embraces a battle-hardened, cynical survivor forged by trauma, watching her world bleed out. It is a radical shift, and it is the reason Alcock’s performance feels so distinct within the DC Universe.
Alcock herself has described the appeal in those terms. She has said she understood from reading the comic that director James Gunn, producing the film, was trying to do something very different and unexpected with Kara, calling her a survivor of trauma in the purest sense and saying she was excited to play someone so beautifully flawed and resilient. She was drawn to the script by Ana Nogueira after just two scenes, describing it as all character, moving from an incredibly dark scene to an irreverent character scene within the first fifteen pages. That tonal swing, darkness beside irreverence, is the film’s signature, and it comes straight from King’s comic, where Kara’s humour is a survival mechanism rather than a quirk.
What the film keeps, above all, is the emotional argument of the comic. Kara’s journey is not about learning to be powerful. She already is. It is about learning whether power, carried by someone who has lost everything, can still be pointed toward something other than revenge. The comic answers that question slowly, through Ruthye’s eyes, and the film, for all its cosmic scale, keeps that intimacy at its centre. Where earlier screen Supergirls, from Melissa Benoist’s television hero to Sasha Calle’s Flash version, each told a different origin, this one finally gives Kara a story that is hers alone, not Superman’s story retold. That is why Woman of Tomorrow was the right comic to adapt, and why the film’s differences from the comics are not betrayals. They are the point: a Supergirl who survived Krypton differently, and who therefore has to become a hero differently, too.
