It’s never a good sign when the creators themselves aren’t familiar with or aren’t fans of the source material. Just ask the fired Marvel producer. Just ask the director behind Marvel’s Secret Invasion.
The Supergirl team sat down with Rolling Stone to defend the movie’s most divisive change, and the interview ended up proving the point instead.
In the all-spoilers conversation with director Craig Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira, Gillespie once again claimed that Ruthye kills Krem in the Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow comic, framing the movie’s ending, where Supergirl does the killing herself, as carrying a similar energy to the book.
Rolling Stone had to step in and correct him in print.
The outlet added an editor’s note clarifying, per Woman of Tomorrow writer Tom King himself, that while an aged Ruthye strikes Krem with her cane after he emerges from the Phantom Zone, King and artist Bilquis Evely never intended readers to think Krem dies.
So the director of the Supergirl movie doesn’t know how the Supergirl comic ends. And it’s not the first time, as Gillespie made the same claim in an earlier interview. Now the mistake has been corrected under the author’s own name.
What makes it stranger is that King isn’t some outside author DC optioned and forgot. He serves as a consultant to Gunn as part of the DC Studios brain trust; he’s behind the Lanterns series arriving on HBO, and his Mister Miracle is also in the DCU pipeline. The man who wrote the book was down the hall the entire time. Nobody making the movie apparently checked with him on how his own story ends, and his correction had to reach the director through a magazine’s editor’s note.
The writer couldn’t find her way into the book
The interview confirms the adaptation problem went deeper than one flub.
Nogueira admits she struggled to find her way into King’s story, describing the comic’s ending as dark in a way she couldn’t use.
Her solution, having Supergirl kill Krem, was in her very first pitch, and it never changed. She also says she knew going in that James Gunn was open to it.
That tracks with what Gillespie already told CBR, that Gunn was adamant about the ending and refused to shoot a backup in case testing went south.
The writer pitched it, the boss locked it in, and the director loved it. The entire leadership owned the choice.
It’s the same story we laid out in our breakdown of why Supergirl failed.
In the comic, Supergirl is in control of her emotions and teaches Ruthye why killing isn’t the answer, sending Krem to the Phantom Zone.
The movie inverts all of it, and the people who made it are on record that they got there by working around the book, not from it.
Safran thought people would cheer
Then there’s the detail that stings the most in hindsight.
Gillespie reveals that at one point Peter Safran told him he felt audiences “should be cheering” at the moment Supergirl kills Krem.
Gillespie pushed back, saying he didn’t see how anyone could cheer it, since Kara loses a part of herself in that moment.
The DC Studios co-CEO thought the climax was a crowd-pleaser.
The crowd answered. Supergirl drew a B- CinemaScore, lower than The Marvels and The Flash, with a definite recommend of just 52% from the audiences that showed up for a $37 million opening. Women and girls also skipped it, as nearly 60% of the audience were made up of males.
Nogueira, for her part, says in the interview that people are generally satisfied by the ending. However, the exit polling says they weren’t satisfied by much of anything.
The verdict was already in
The interview was conducted three days before release, when everyone involved still believed the swing would land.
Read now, it plays as a document of how the movie went wrong: a writer who couldn’t connect with the source, a director who still hasn’t read it closely enough to describe its ending, and a studio chief who expected cheers for the moment fans point to as the betrayal of the character.
Tom King got the last word anyway, even if Rolling Stone had to add it in brackets.
