Tom King Ended the Debate Regarding Krem’s Fate in ‘Supergirl’ Years Ago, and It’s Highly Controversial

A two-year-old interview with Tom King is suddenly everywhere, and it is because the ‘Supergirl‘ film just made it newly relevant. In a quote resurfaced by DCU Brief, King stated plainly that Krem’s fate at the end of ‘Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow’ was never meant to be ambiguous, and that Krem is supposed to be alive at the end of the story.

The film, now in theaters, made a very different choice, and fans of the source material have been debating it since opening night.

In Craig Gillespie’s film, Milly Alcock’s Kara convinces young Ruthye not to kill Krem and then, once Ruthye is out of earshot, picks up the sword herself and fatally stabs the villain three times, once for each major wrong he committed against Kara and her charge. The scene then frames this as the morally correct decision, with Kara returning to Earth appearing more confident and fulfilled than she has been throughout the film.

The comic handles the moment entirely differently. King and artist Bilquis Evely’s original ending has neither Kara nor Ruthye kill Krem, with both characters concluding that enough killing has already been done. Instead, Krem is banished to the Phantom Zone, and a centuries-later epilogue reveals him as a repentant old man who has served his sentence and sincerely begs Ruthye for her forgiveness, a richer and more unsettling resolution than any sword to the throat.

One of the more striking ironies of the film’s ending is that it essentially adopts the fake ending from within the source material. King’s comic contains a book written by Ruthye about her adventures with Supergirl, and that book falsely claims Kara killed Krem. The film turns Ruthye’s unreliable in-universe narrative into the actual conclusion.

Multiple critics and comics analysts have argued that the film’s ending actively undermines the thematic core of King and Evely’s work, which functions as a straightforward deconstruction of revenge narratives, with Kara’s entire purpose in the story being to teach Ruthye that killing Krem would hollow her out.

Having Kara then deliver the killing blow herself, and having that act be portrayed as emotionally cathartic rather than morally costly, strips the lesson of its weight.

Others have defended the change on the grounds that the film’s version of Krem is a categorically darker character than his comics counterpart, with the screen incarnation played by Matthias Schoenaerts as a superhuman sex trafficker and mass killer, making Kara’s final act feel proportionate in a way that the comics Krem’s relatively smaller crimes arguably did not.

King himself has stayed publicly supportive of the film throughout its promotion, speaking warmly about the adaptation and praising Alcock’s performance, so whether his 2024 quote about Krem’s intended survival reflects any lingering frustration or simply canonical clarification remains unclear.

What is clear is that the question of whether Kara Zor-El should ever kill, and what it means when she does, is now the defining conversation around one of the most discussed superhero films of the summer.

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