Monday Movie News Musings (01-29-24)

DC Studios picks their Supergirl,' 'Ghostbusters: The Frozen Empire' gets a Phoebe-lite trailer, DreamWorks doubles down on Dav Pilkey, 'Mean Girls' Tops 'Beekeeper,' etc.

Princess Targaryen is our new(est) Supergirl… yay?
Just as I was writing this, The Hollywood Reporter, uh, reported that Amelia "Milly" Alcock will be playing Kara Zor-El in the next round of DC Comics movies. The star of House of the Dragon will play Supergirl in both her own solo movie Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow and whatever other James Gunn and Peter Safron-produced DC Studios flicks she gets tossed into.

It’s a nice bit of corporate synergy, with the headliner of the biggest HBO show now playing a key role in what WBD hopes will be their next grand IP franchise. Without knowing the inside baseball, I’d imagine being the star of a popular Game of Thrones spin-off produced for the same studio gave her at least a token advantage. It’s a gift to SEO-chasing writers, since they will be able to put “Supergirl” or “DC Studios” and “Game of Thrones” or “House of the Dragon” in the same headline.

Time will tell if she ends up cameoing in Gunn’s Superman Legacy, which is still slated to kick off the second attempt to make a DC cinematic universe on July 11, 2025. To the extent that the previous DC Films franchise didn’t quite pan out, casting essentially the entire universe — between Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad — right at the start didn’t exactly leave much wiggle room when Dawn of Justice didn’t quite connect ($873 million global but from a $425 million worldwide opening weekend). Maybe the proverbial powers than be should focus on making the first unquestionably successful Superman movie since Superman II in 1981 and then worry about the other movies and the cinematic universe elements.

More cynically speaking, I’m curious to what extent this universe reset — which cannot help but be constructed in reaction to the controversial DC Films universe — will end up looking a lot more… traditional (“for the fans”) than the last Jason Momoa/Gal Gadot/Ezra Miller/Will Smith-starring go-around. That’s not fair to Gunn and Safron, and certainly not the actors in contention, but the optics of swapping Sasha Calle for Milly Alcock will need some massaging. We’ll see to what extent we end up with a league of Super Friends who more closely resemble… what the original comics looked like back in the day compared to what we got in the 2010s.