The Supergirl Trailer Just Set Up Man of Tomorrow in a Major Way (And You Missed It)

DC Studios is playing the long game with its freshly started DCU. This summer’s Superman may have kicked the door down on the franchise in a major way, and its success has already given Warner Bros. the confidence to pursue a sequel in 2027’s Man of Tomorrow. This film will team up Superman and Lex Luthor to fight a common enemy, which many believe to be the DC villain, Brainiac. Fans have assumed that Man of Tomorrow will pick up not only from the events of the movie starring David Corenswet and Nicholas Hoult, but also the cliffhanger ending that happened in the Peacemaker Season 2 finale. Now we know there’s another connection brewing.

Today saw the release of the first teaser trailer for Supergirl, the upcoming second movie in the DCU that will debut in the summer of 2026. After fans got a taste of Milly Alcock’s version of Kara Zor-El in Superman, the hype for the movie was already quite high, but now the first look at footage has revealed a high-octane intergalactic adventure that seems to stand apart completely from James Gunn’s Superman while still clearly existing in the same world. There was another element, though, worth considering: how it’s already going to set up Man of Tomorrow.

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Supergirl Teases the Survival of Argo City

The trailer for Supergirl has a few key objectives that it needed to get across to audiences, the first is selling them on this specific character, who previously only had one seen in Superman, showing off her dimensions and what sets her apart from her cousin. Second, Supergirl‘s trailer had to confirm that this isn’t an identical movie to Superman without its own identity. Arguably, it manages to do both of those things, but in how it sells that first objective is a detail that makes it clear the DCU was already thinking about Man of Tomorrow well before it was announced.

In just a few seconds in the trailer for Supergirl, the trailer reveals details of Kara’s backstory, specifically, the destruction of her home planet, Krypton. There are a few other instances of Krypton shown in the trailer, like Kara attending what seems like a funeral, but there’s a key sequence in the footage that is lifted directly from the Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow comic book series, the survival of Argo City.

In the pages of DC Comics, Argo City was a place on Krypton that had a protective dome around it to keep its citizens safe, which, in fact, managed to preserve it when the planet itself was destroyed. Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow features Kara detailing what happened to the survivors of Argo City as it drifted through space, an instance further hinted at in the trailer, but it paints a picture of a woman who has mourned her home, family, and culture for years, whose connectivity back to it remains isolated to her cousin on Earth and her dog.

Now, what we’re getting at here is a long-winded connectivity to this film setting up Man of Tomorrow, but it’s there. In the Woman of Tomorrow comic series, dialogue from which is said directly in the Supergirl trailer, Kara reflects on Argo City and Krypton’s destruction, but what do we know about Man of Tomorrow villain Brainiac? He has in his possession, at least in the comics, another piece of Krypton that managed to survive, the bottle city of Kandor. With Supergirl setting the groundwork for Argo City and its eventual falling apart, the hint that there are other actual surviving Kryptonians out in the world, and that Brainiac has them, could become a key piece of Man of Tomorrow, and likely the progression of Supergirl and Superman’s character arcs in the DCU.

This is all speculation on our part, but knowing that the threat of Brainiac looms and the loss of Krypton is a key piece of Kara’s journey in Supergirl makes this a distinct link between the two movies. That’s not to say that Supergirl won’t be its own self-contained story; it very clearly seems to be playing by its own rules despite larger DCU connections. Despite this, like any good cinematic universe, the powers that be will use every chance they have to make the next movie connect to what’s coming down the line, and Supergirl is teeing up Man of Tomorrow in a big way.