With Milly Alcock’s Supergirl (2026) arriving on 26 June, the question isn’t just whether it’ll be a good superhero film — it’s whether it can finally undo the damage done 42 years ago by the original 1984 film. Because make no mistake: the original Jeannot Szwarc film didn’t just fail. It actually set female-led superhero films back by decades.
The Year That Had Everything — Except a Good Superhero Film
1984 was an awesome year for movies, offering everything from Gremlins to Ghostbusters, The Terminator to Top Secret, and This Is Spinal Tap to A Nightmare On Elm Street. If you were a fan of comedy, sci-fi, action or horror, it was the year when pop culture entertainment was turned up to 11. But for superhero films, it was a very bad year. There weren’t really any superhero films in 1984, except for… Supergirl.
How Supergirl (1984) Got Made — and Why It Was Doomed From the Start
Like a good little nerdy kid of the time, I’d read some of her comics and recognised her on sight. Sure, they weren’t as much fun as most other comics, but she was a part of the Superman family, and the poster promised it was “Her first great adventure”, so I was interested anyway. Plus, she was pretty. With high hopes, I went to the cinema to watch it anyway because there was no way it would be as bad as Superman III had been. To this day, I can’t tell if I was wrong or not.
The Plot of Supergirl (1984): Witches, Warlocks, and a Magic Ball
Argo City is a Kryptonian community that exists in trans-dimensional space. Or a lake on Earth. It’s kind of hard to tell. Zaltar (Peter O’Toole), the cheerful, irresponsible town alcoholic who’s using the city’s Omegahedron to create living art, lets Kara Zor-El (Helen Slater) give it a whirl. It goes horribly wrong, and the Omegahedron flies off to Earth. Kara gives chase and becomes Supergirl. Unfortunately, the Omegahedron falls into the hands of a wannabe witch called Selena (Faye Dunaway) – who’s busy dating a warlock named Nigel (Peter Cook). Yes, his name is Nigel. Don’t laugh.
Kara makes a quick change and becomes Linda Lee, enrols herself in the same school where Nigel is a teacher, and befriends Lois Lane’s sister Lucy (Maureen Teefy). Oh, and she falls in love with a dopey groundskeeper called Ethan (Hart Bochner). Ethan, naturally, is also a piece of eye candy for Selena, who uses the Omegahedron to brainwash him… assuming he’s got a brain at all. It backfires on Selena, and Ethan falls in love with Supergirl instead.
The Finale That Made No Sense
Supergirl and Selena “fight”, and Supergirl gets banished to the Phantom Zone. While she’s there, she hooks up again with Zaltar, who’s exiled himself for being so naughty. With his help, Supergirl escapes and battles Selena – who’s made herself the “Princess of Earth” – one last time.
Supergirl outsmarts Selena and traps her and her pinhead sister in a mirror forever. With Ethan no longer brainwashed, he admits that he actually loves Supergirl’s alter-ego, Linda Lee (Duh!), and Supergirl flies off with the Omegahedron back to Argo City, which is now able to stop its rolling blackouts. The end.
Why Supergirl (1984) Failed — and the Damage It Left Behind
These days, we talk about how bad 2015’s Fantastic Four, Madame Web, Morbius or X-Men: The Last Stand was, but a film like the 1984 Supergirl movie truly puts it all in perspective. It’s bad, and even as a kid, I knew I was watching a stinker. It gave me the same feeling of disappointment I felt many, many years later when I watched Green Lantern. It’s really bad, and, on the surface, it’s almost entirely unwatchable. Please note that I said almost.
Yes, there are countless things wrong with the 1984 Supergirl movie. Plot holes like how the residents of Argo City know of Superman and Clark Kent and could travel to Earth at any time (but don’t) are bizarre. Supergirl, with all her amazing powers, struggles to defeat a man-eating construction site digger. The casting is questionable, the dialogue is awful, the effects are cheesy, and it’s a product of its time.
And if you want Easter eggs, there’s a doozy because Lucy Lane is shown reading a comic book… And it’s a MARVEL comic book! Yes, in a DC film, a character reads a comic book of The Incredible Hulk. Wow, Just… wow.
How the Production Chaos Behind Supergirl (1984) Sealed Its Fate
The truth is that the failure of Supergirl (1984) wasn’t just because of the creative choices. When you look at everything that happened behind the scenes, the film honestly never had a chance of surviving. And when you look back at it now, it makes sense why it cost $35 million to produce but grossed less than $15 million at the box office.
Behind the scenes, chaos reigned. Faye Dunaway’s reported on-set behaviour caused constant delays. At one point, the producers even considered replacing her with Anjelica Huston or Jane Fonda.
Then, when distributor Tri-Star got hold of Supergirl, they actually stripped around half an hour from director Jeannot Szwarc’s original cut without his involvement. That explains why the final version is so choppy and doesn’t have some of the essential character development.
Ultimately, the consequences of Supergirl’s failure went far beyond one bad weekend at the box office. For years, studios pointed to it as evidence that audiences wouldn’t pay to see female-driven superhero films. That toxic myth haunted the genre for the next two decades.
And beyond that, Supergirl ultimately led the Salkinds to sell the Superman film rights to Cannon Films entirely.
But it wasn’t all bad news, was it?
What Supergirl (1984) Actually Got Right
Helen Slater is a great Supergirl, exuding fun and enthusiasm. The inclusion of Lucy Lane is a neat addition, while the villains are of the same campy nature as Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor. It’s good seeing a guy be the “damsel in distress”, and the cameo of Superman’s Marc McClure as Jimmy Olsen is enough to make it feel like the film is part of a bigger DC universe.
Speaking of which, the Phantom Zone in this film manages to recapture the classic appearance of the one in Superman. Yet it also brings a few new elements to it, which were later recreated in Smallville. Even the Omegahedron, as goofy as it is, has appeared in The CW’s Supergirl TV show… so it certainly left an impression. This may not have been a good film, yet at times, it succeeds, and it helped pave the way for better things.
How Milly Alcock’s Supergirl (2026) Will Differ
Director Craig Gillespie has described Milly Alcock’s Kara as having “a lot of demons, a lot of baggage”. In fact, she’s a deliberately darker, more complex character than her cousin, Superman. Where Superman (2025) was set entirely on Earth, Supergirl (2026) jumps from planet to planet as a high-stakes space opera. It won’t be set in Midvale, Illinois. There’s no witch. No warlock. No Ethan.
Alcock herself has described the film as swinging between extremes of darkness and irreverence, sometimes within the same scene. Everything the 1984 version got wrong — the tone, the stakes, the faith in its lead — the 2026 film is explicitly designed to get right.
Supergirl (1984)’s Legacy — and What Milly Alcock Has to Overcome
If you’re looking for a great superhero movie or even a mediocre one, then Supergirl (1984) isn’t it. It didn’t hold up then, and it doesn’t hold up now, except maybe for a slight sense of nostalgia. There are some good ideas scattered about, but they’re mostly lost opportunities.
Was it as bad as Superman III, though? To this day, I’m genuinely not sure. That film featured Clark Kent fighting Superman, which was awesome, but it also featured Richard Pryor skiing off the side of a building. At least Supergirl (1984) had a pretty cool Supergirl, so it’s hard to say which was worse. All I know for sure is that it was better than Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. So maybe Supergirl (1984) wasn’t that bad after all… Maybe. Whether or not it is better than Wonder Woman 1984 is entirely up to you.
And, yes, that Supergirl curse has a name and a number to beat: $14.3 million. That’s what the 1984 film made against a $35 million budget — enough to convince Hollywood that female superheroes couldn’t carry a film for the next two decades. Milly Alcock doesn’t just have a movie to make. She has a myth and a curse to kill.
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