Here's Why 'Supergirl' Ends and Sounds Like That
As one of the big movies of the weekend, folks are watching Supergirl and have their thoughts on it. The same goes for director Craig Gillespie and writer Ann Nogueira, who’ve been talking to press about how the movie’s production. First announced as an adaptation of Bilquis Everly and Tom King’s award-winning graphic novel Woman of Tomorrow, the finished product is…not really that, and now the two have taken to explaining some key changes made in the film.
After defeating Krem of the Yellow Hills’ forces and talking Ruthye out of killing the man who slaughtered her family, Kara goes and finishes him off herself. It’s a sharp divergence from the comic, where Krem spends years imprisoned in the Phantom Zone before he’s freed and a now elderly Ruthye hits him in the face before walking off. Nogueira told Entertainment Weekly this change has always been part of her initial pitch for the movie, and one signed off by producers James Gunn and Peter Safran. “We gotta kill the guy, and we can’t let the little girl do it,” she recalled saying. While stuck writing, she eventually realized Kara’s final lines to Krem would bring everything home: ‘This is for my dog,’ and ‘This is for what you did to that little girl’ are the movie.”
Now back on Earth and living in Metropolis, Supergirl will return for 2027’s Man of Tomorrow. To Nogueira, her killing Krem is a way to “define herself differently than Superman. She has to say, ‘I have my own morality and sense of goodness. I don’t have a rule you have—I have my own guidance and the ability to discern when I’m gonna take somebody off the map. I know this is the right thing to do.'” With Lex Luthor and Brainiac in Tomorrow, and one of them having harmed her dog in Superman, this might not be the last time Kara gets her hands dirty.
That she kills Krem is already one of Supergirl’s most divisive moments, and comes before something that’s got folks even more split: a slo-mo sequence where Kara fights Krem’s forces set to a cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” by Kelty Greye and KidMotel. When asked about the song by Rolling Stone, Nogueira said there were “a lot of options” for a needle drop, with Gillespie saying there were 45 potential songs set against that scene. “I gotta give James [Gunn, producer] credit for that one,” he said. “That was probably the biggest discussion, and it was down to the very last week.”
Nogueira revealed that action scene almost had a different song, but was quiet on the runner-up. Instead, Gillespie teased the other candidate was “a remix of a classic, and you almost need to see it as the remix, because the orchestration was what made it so beautiful.”
It might be a while before someone at WB tells us what mystery song the two are referring to. Until then, let us know what you song you’d have used for Supergirl in its place, and what you think of how the film stacks up to the Woman of Tomorrow comic.
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