A superdog, a Devon rock band, and a week of comic-book bets: your entertainment guide for the days ahead

A new Supergirl lands in cinemas on Friday 26 June 2026, and a Devon trio return with another collection of capital-letter rock. Between those two events sits the rest of the week's entertainment: festival tail-ends, an indie release or two, and the small, telling bets the industry is making about what audiences will still pay to see.

What the calendar really tests this week is whether the superhero monoculture can survive another origin story and whether guitar-led arena rock still has a touring life in 2026. Both questions have been asked before; both keep getting answered differently.

A Kryptonian, a superdog and a studio under pressure

Milly Alcock dons the cape as Kara Zor-El in Supergirl, the latest DC Studios release opening wide on 26 June 2026. The early publicity has leaned hard on Krypto the superdog — the marketing logic is that a flying, scene-stealing canine buys goodwill in a market that has cooled on caped heroes since the post-2023 slump. Whether that read is right or wishful is one of the questions the opening weekend will settle.

The film's release lands at an awkward moment for the parent studio. James Gunn's relaunched DC universe has not yet produced a clean theatrical hit at the scale the parent company wants. Superman, the soft-launch of the new continuity, opened to a respectable but not transformative number last summer. Supergirl is, in effect, the second data point: the first time a non-Superman DC character has been asked to carry the brand on her own. The stakes are commercial, not just critical — the slate behind it, including a new Batman, is being costed against this film's run.

The lead choice is also doing some work. Alcock broke out as young Rhaenyra in House of the Dragon, a role that asked her to carry a prestige drama before she was twenty-five. Putting her in a comic-book lead is a different kind of bet — younger, less bankable, more associated with HBO than with capes — and the trade press has been quietly attentive to it.

The counter-bet: more capes, or fewer?

The counter-narrative in the trade pages is that the superhero genre is not in retreat so much as in triage. The titles that have travelled best in the last eighteen months have been the ones that knew what they were: violent, funny, short, or all three. The ones that have underperformed have generally been the ones that asked an exhausted audience to do homework.

Supergirl is, by most accounts, closer to the first category. The reviews that have run so far describe a film that moves, has a sense of humour about its own mythology, and does not overstay its welcome. None of that guarantees a box-office outcome — nothing does anymore — but it changes the texture of the bet. The genre is not dying; it is being repriced.

Muse and the all-caps question

If Supergirl is the studio release the week turns on, Muse are the touring act. The Devon three-piece return this week with another collection of what their own marketing has, with characteristic restraint, called all-caps rock. The phrasing is self-aware enough to be useful: Muse have spent two decades building a brand out of maximalism, and the question any new album has to answer is whether the maximalism still sounds like conviction or like a costume.

The honest read is that the answer has shifted with each record. The 2nd Law sounded like a band in genuine transition; Drones sounded like a band that had decided what it was. The new material, from the snippets that have circulated, sits somewhere between those two poles — bigger than the band's recent live sound, more controlled than the mid-2000s peak. Whether that middle gear is what the arena circuit wants is the test the tour will run.

The structural frame here matters beyond the band. Guitar-led arena rock in 2026 is a smaller category than it was a decade ago. The acts that still fill those rooms are the ones with a generational backlog — Muse, Metallica, the Foo Fighters, the bands that grew up with MTV and kept their audiences through the streaming years. New entrants are rare. That scarcity is good for legacy acts and bad for the format's long-term health, and the industry knows it.

The rest of the week

Around those two events, the calendar carries its usual freight. Festival residue from the spring season is still working through the cinema release schedule; a handful of smaller films, mostly European and Asian, are opening in platform releases in major cities; and the streaming services are dropping the second halves of shows they split across late spring and summer, in the hope of keeping subscribers through the doldrums.

None of those releases have the marketing footprint of a DC film or a Muse record, and the coverage this week will reflect that. The job of a guide like this is not to pretend every release is equally important; it is to mark which ones the industry is actually watching and which ones are filler.

Stakes and the shape of the summer

The bigger stakes sit underneath both marquee items. For DC Studios, Supergirl is the second data point on a relaunched universe the parent company has spent heavily to set up. A soft opening would not kill the slate, but it would change the cost of capital on every project behind it. For Muse, the album and tour are a test of whether a band that built its audience in a different media environment can still grow it in this one.

The week also quietly answers a third question, the one nobody in the trade press likes to write down: whether the older model of a tentpole Friday plus a flagship album drop plus a few well-placed prestige titles is still the right shape for a summer calendar. So far this season the answer has been mixed. Supergirl and Muse will not settle it, but they will move the needle.

How Monexus framed this vs the wire: the studio-trade coverage this week will treat Supergirl mostly as a brand-execution story and Muse mostly as a tour story. The interesting frame is the one that puts both in the same sentence — two institutions, one thirty years old and one brand new, both being asked the same question about whether the audience they were built for is still the audience that shows up.