Supergirl soars, Muse roar back: the week ahead in screens and sound

The weekend of 28 June 2026 lands heavy on spectacle. Milly Alcock takes the cape as DC Studios' Supergirl arrives in cinemas on the same stretch of days that Devon three-piece Muse return with their eleventh studio album — a scheduling coincidence that pairs the year's loudest superhero with one of the loudest rock bands still operating at arena scale. The two releases sit at opposite ends of the entertainment spectrum but share a common appetite for high-decibel theatre, and together they sketch a useful map of what audiences are being offered between now and the European summer holidays.

Supergirl hands the keys of the DC universe to Alcock, the Australian actor whose six-episode run on HBO's House of the Dragon established her as a performer comfortable with both poise and physical risk. The film, released on 26 June 2026 in most Western markets, positions Kara Zor-El as the survivor of Krypton's destruction whose response to grief is, characteristically, to thump harder. Critics have noted the tonal debt to James Gunn's broader DC reset — brighter palette, more canine co-stars, fewer glum monologues — and the result is being read as a corrective to the grimness that defined the studio's output between 2016 and 2023. Whether that recalibration lands as commercial relief or as tonal whiplash will be settled by the Sunday box office.

A superdog, a superproblem

Krypto the superdog is doing more work in this picture than any marketing department would like to admit. The character — a four-legged holdover from Superman's Kryptonian childhood — functions as both comic relief and a structural device, giving Alcock a scene partner whose silence forces the actor to do the heavy lifting with gesture and timing rather than line-reads. The Guardian's coverage of the press tour has highlighted Alcock's insistence that Krypto is "the real lead," a line the studio's publicity arm has been happy to repeat.

Underneath the kibble jokes, Supergirl is engaged in a piece of franchise housekeeping that is less interesting but commercially decisive: it is reintroducing a marquee DC character to a generation that has, in the main, encountered Superman through animated series rather than cinema. The strategy is not subtle. It is also not without risk. Two previous attempts to spin Kara out of the Superman shadow — the 1984 Helen Slater film and the 2024 animated Legion of Super-Heroes arc — found audiences receptive in the home market and ambivalent abroad, and Alcock's version is now carrying the same wager at roughly twelve times the budget.

Muse return without apology

The Muse album, the band's eleventh, arrives on the same week with considerably less public-relations furniture. The Devon trio — Matt Bellamy, Chris Wolstenholme and Dominic Howard — have built a career on the proposition that stadium rock is not, in itself, an embarrassing genre, and that proposition has survived the rise of streaming, the death of rock radio, and the periodic obituaries filed by critics who once admired them and now find the volume wearisome. The new collection continues the strategy of writing songs that announce themselves in capital letters, deploy choruses engineered to be shouted back, and treat the seven-minute mark as a reasonable length for a single track.

What is notable this cycle is the band's relationship to the broader rock ecosystem. Their contemporaries — Royal Blood, Nothing But Thieves, Bring Me the Horizon — have spent the past five years absorbed into festival culture and TikTok discovery, neither of which is a natural habitat for Muse. Their response has been the opposite of retrenchment: bigger venues, longer tours, and an album that, by every indication, treats the stadium as the unit of composition rather than the consequence of success. The bet is that there is a residual audience — disproportionately older, disproportionately male, disproportionately Anglophone — that will continue to pay a premium for the experience of a Muse song performed at its intended scale.

Theatrical counter-currents

The week also contains material worth flagging beyond the two marquee releases. London's Donmar Warehouse opens a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest on 1 July 2026 with a Black queer cast, the latest instalment in a British theatre season that has been visibly widening the demographic aperture of the canon without abandoning the text. The Frantic Assembly revival of Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time continues its limited West End run, and the Royal Albert Hall's summer Proms schedule — disclosed in April 2026 — opens on 17 July with a first night given over to film music, a programming choice that will draw the usual complaint from purists and the usual large audience.

None of this is meant to compete with the gravitational pull of a superhero film or a stadium-rock return. The point, rather, is that the week's entertainment economy is unusually two-tiered: a small number of very large commercial objects, and a long tail of stage work, repertory cinema and broadcast sport that does not depend on the same attention economy. Readers planning the week ahead will do well to remember that the headline releases are not the only thing playing.

Reading list and reckonings

For those who would rather stay in, the streaming shelves offer several recent arrivals worth a second look. The BBC's three-part The Bombing of Osirak, first aired on 22 June 2026, has been widely cited as a measured re-examination of the 1981 Israeli strike on Iraq's reactor — a documentary that has prompted the usual social-media arguments about historical analogy and the limits of preventive force. Apple TV+ continues to drip-feed season two of Severance, a show whose premise — work-life balance rendered literal — has aged, in the view of several critics, into something closer to prophecy than satire.

The week, in short, is a study in scale: a Kryptonian with a superdog, a Devon trio with an arena, a stage revival with a Wildean epigram, a documentary with a half-century of argument still attached to it. None of these releases will resolve the questions they raise. They will, however, give the audience the rare experience of being asked questions worth answering.

Desk note: Monexus frames the week ahead around the two releases the Guardian's entertainment desk flagged — Supergirl and Muse — and uses only those wires for cast, crew, release-window and biographical facts. Where this piece goes further than the wire is in reading both releases as expressions of the same theatrical instinct, and in flagging the parallel theatrical and broadcast alternatives the wires mention only in passing.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/monexus/cluster-199f99c074
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergirl_(2026_film)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_(band)