Krypto gets poisoned. That detail is buried in the second Supergirl trailer like it’s a tearjerker beat, and every piece of coverage treating it that way is missing the point. If you’ve read Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Woman of Tomorrow — the 2021 eight-issue miniseries this film is adapting — you know the poisoning isn’t setup. It’s the engine. Kara doesn’t go on this journey because she wants to be a hero. She goes because her dog is dying and the only lead she has is a murderer named Krem of the Yellow Hills who’s already a galaxy away.
The second official trailer for Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl dropped Wednesday alongside a first trailer released April 1, and together they make the strongest case yet for what kind of film this actually is. We’ve got our clearest look at Jason Momoa’s Lobo, a proper plot outline, the Superman cameo confirmed, and a tone so different from James Gunn’s Superman that it almost feels designed as a corrective. Here’s what’s actually worth unpacking.
The Tom King Foundation
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is one of the genuinely great superhero comics of the last decade. King and Evely published it over eight issues in 2021-22, and it works because it’s structurally odd — the story is narrated by Ruthye Marye Knoll, the young alien girl Kara meets, who writes about Supergirl from the outside, long after the fact. That retrospective framing gives the comic its emotional weight. We know going in that Ruthye survived. We’re reading her testimony about what it was like to watch Kara Zor-El operate at her most stripped-back and honest.
The film is following this blueprint closely. Eve Ridley’s Ruthye is prominent in both trailers. The plot — Kara on a red-sun planet where she’s powerless, getting drunk on her birthday, until Krem attacks and poisons Krypto, forcing a galaxy-spanning chase — is taken almost directly from the source. That matters because King’s version of this story earns its dark tone. It’s not grimdark for its own sake. It’s about what heroism looks like when it comes from someone who never had the luxury of optimism.
Kara watched Krypton die. She remembers. Clark doesn’t. “He sees the goodness in everyone,” Alcock tells Corenswet in the trailer. “I see the truth.” That single line is the best encapsulation of the difference between these two characters that anyone’s put on screen. King spent eight issues building to that kind of clarity. The trailer lands it in twelve seconds.
What Momoa as Lobo Actually Means
Here’s the thing about this casting that most trailer coverage glosses over: Jason Momoa reportedly wanted to play Lobo before he ever took the Aquaman role. He spent eight years in the DCEU as a heroic figure — noble, muscle-bound, ultimately trying to save the world. That franchise ended with the old universe. In Gunn’s DCU, Momoa’s back as something completely different.
Lobo is the last surviving Czarnian — because he killed all the others himself, rated himself an A+ on his own genocide homework, and moved on. He’s a bounty hunter. He regenerates from near anything. Keith Giffen and Alan Grant built him in the late 1980s as a deliberate parody of the grimdark anti-hero trend, then watched the parody outlive its target and become beloved on its own terms. He’s excessive and funny and genuinely dangerous, and the best version of the character holds all three things at once.
The trailers suggest Gillespie understands the balance. Momoa’s Lobo reads threatening — there’s a shot of him towering over Alcock that carries real menace — but there’s something almost cheerful in it. That’s the character. And crucially, in King’s Woman of Tomorrow, Lobo isn’t the villain. He’s something more complicated: a foil for Kara, a measuring stick, a question about what separates violence done for vengeance from violence done for money. The film appears to be following that thread. Good.
David Corenswet’s Superman Cameo
It’s small, and it’s deliberate. Clark on a video screen checking in on Kara, asking when she’s coming back to Earth, doing what Clark does — worrying about someone while wearing the optimism on his sleeve. Corenswet filmed new material for this specifically. The interaction sets up the film’s central tension without requiring him to be present for it: Kara is defined by what she is when Superman isn’t around to set the moral tone.
That’s the right use of the cameo. Milly Alcock doesn’t need a co-sign from the last film — she needs the contrast. She gets it.
Why This Film’s Timing Is Right
Gunn’s Superman was deliberately hopeful — and it needed to be, as the foundation of a new universe. Supergirl arriving at a darker frequency isn’t a contradiction. It’s proof the DCU can run different emotional registers simultaneously, which is exactly what the old DCEU couldn’t manage. Tom King’s story earns its bruises. Craig Gillespie directed I, Tonya — he knows how to frame a complicated protagonist without flattening her into either a hero or a victim.
Krypto better survive. That’s my only condition.
Supergirl hits theaters June 26, 2026.