Supergirl Lands: Milly Alcock Soars, the Film Divides
Craig Gillespie's new DC film opens June 26, and the first reviews agree on only one thing: the lead actress carries the entire show on her shoulders.
- Supergirl, directed by Craig Gillespie, opens in North America on June 26, after an international launch that began on June 24.
- Milly Alcock, the breakout from House of the Dragon, plays Kara Zor-El and takes the lion's share of the praise.
- The first reviews are mixed: the star carries the film, but the project itself reads as a shallow blockbuster that never quite takes off.
- Domestic opening weekend forecasts are sliding toward roughly 40 to 48 million dollars, against strong animated competition.
There is a moment in every franchise when an actor walks on screen carrying the whole hope of a studio, and in those few seconds the audience knows exactly whether the casting was right. With Milly Alcock that moment arrives early, before the costume has proven anything, and the answer is unambiguous. The Australian actress, whom audiences first met as the young Rhaenyra in House of the Dragon, steps into Kara Zor-El with such composure that the real authorial signature of the film seems to be her, rather than everything assembled around her.
Craig Gillespie’s film reaches North American theaters on June 26, two days after its international launch, as the second stone in the foundation of the new film house run by James Gunn and Peter Safran. After Superman set the tone for this universe, Supergirl was meant to confirm that the project has staying power, not merely a strong opening. The first reviews, however, do not hand over that confirmation easily.
Can one actress carry an entire universe?
The critical consensus is unusually clear in its division. Almost every notice opens with the same sentence, however paraphrased: Alcock is a revelation, and everything else is variable. Her Kara is neither a cold superhero nor a caricature of vulnerability, but a character who carries the anger and exhaustion of the last witness to a destroyed planet, and it is precisely there, in that emotional register, that the film occasionally touches something real.
The trouble is that it does not hold the note. Where the actress builds an interior arc, the screenplay settles for an external effect, so the result is described as a blockbuster that knows where it is going only while the camera stays on her face. Gillespie, the director who showed a taste for figures on the edge in I, Tonya and Cruella, is plainly most assured in the intimate scenes and least convincing when he has to deliver the obligatory spectacle. The outcome is a film that remembers its chamber moments more readily than its explosions, which for a superhero title is no small contradiction.
What a soft start says about the studio’s ambition
The numbers arriving before the weekend are not encouraging. Domestic opening forecasts are dropping to around 40 to 48 million dollars, which for a film of this scale and this universe reads more as a warning than a triumph, especially with animated hits taking the family audience in the same slot. After Superman, which set expectations high, that figure sounds like a quiet caution that a familiar symbol on the chest no longer guarantees a full house.
Still, it would be unfair to reduce the whole equation to an opening weekend. Universes are not built on premieres but on characters who survive a second and third viewing, and Alcock is exactly such a character, an actress we will certainly be watching in whatever comes next. The question is not whether she is the right card, because she is, but whether the studio can write a film worthy of its lead. Will you watch Supergirl for the franchise or for Milly Alcock, and do you even draw that distinction?
