Adapting Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow for Cinema

While it is unfair to judge a movie before seeing it, there is an interesting opportunity with Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow to speculate on how such a dense, complicated, and challenging story might be adapted for the cinema and what that might say about transmediation in general. #supergirl 1/12

In “Comics in Motion: The Intersemiotic Translation of Comics into film,” Frederico Zecca suggests that adapting comics to film is an enterprise restricted by “technological/linguistic, economical, and institutional constraints.” Simply put, this is a complex and multifaceted problem. 2/12

King’s story-within-a-story-within(kinda)-a-story is not one that lends itself easily to a medium that doesn’t really afford the opportunity to re-watch, re-wind, and re-visit key scenes as they’ve been recontextualized by later developments. 3/12

Technically, this could, of course, be done (and there’s movies, such as Memento, that very much do this) but it is unlikely (if not impossible) for a summer blockbuster DCU tentpole film to take such an approach, and so it is likely that the narrative the film delivers will need to be greatly simplified. 4/12

On the positive side, modern CGI and special effects are quite capable of making a gorgeous meal out of Evely and Lopes’s virtuoso visual work, and this film will indeed have the kind of budget to make that realization a possibility. 5/12

Both Evely and Lopes, however, in their respective roles, are operating on a largely surreal level, rather than in a grounded visual reality and that attention to non-iconic abstraction will be difficult (if not impossible) to translate in terms of its various impacts. 6/12

Will King et al’s vision find life on the silver screen or are we in for a shallow “murder is bad, dogs and friendship are good” kind of story? Is there space within the blockbuster cinematic vocabulary to find the same nuances and themes that the comic is so deeply invested in? 7/12

There are easy answers here: “who cares? The comic already exists;” “If you don’t like what cinema does, don’t watch it” or very simply: “no.” But the modern media landscape is integrated in ways that we don’t often discuss and these have consequences. 8/12

First and foremost, the movie will (and already has) provide a DRAMATIC increase in cultural awareness and sales for the book itself. The comic’s audience, legacy, and financial value will skyrocket in direct consequence of the movie – bad, good, or great – being made. 9/12

On the opposite side of that, the viability of DC comics is very much dependent on the success (or failure) of its cinematic universe counterpart and the current business model largely uses comics as an IP farm for adaptation into other, more profitable media. There’s pressure here. 10/12

Finally, there’s also an intriguing role of cultural capital in play. With everyone going to the movie this summer, it becomes possible for a reader to achieve social/cultural mobility just by having read the source material – that or they become the worst person to attend the film with. Still. 11/12

In case it isn’t obvious, I don’t have a profound point here, just a “hey, look” in the direction of the new Supergirl movie to track, question, and discuss the ways that, in 2026, the transmediation of a comics property into film exists within a complex matrix of concerns and pressures. I’m intrigued. 12/12