DC released a teaser for Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl on December 11, offering an early look at Jason Momoa as a ruthless bounty hunter, Lobo, and Milly Alcock’s Kara Zor‑El (best known from House of the Dragon) dispatching swarms of space pirates. The trailer’s most consequential beat is fleeting: a golden, jar‑like device lifts an alien metropolis and shrinks it into a portable container — a clear nod to the classic Brainiac story. That blink‑and‑you‑miss‑it image quietly foreshadows Brainiac’s larger role in the DC Universe and appears to set up the villain for the Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow. Read more on the casting.
Brainiac first appeared in 1958 in Action Comics #242, created by Otto Binder, in a tale where the villain shrank cities such as Metropolis and Paris into bottles as trophies. In that original arc Superman manages to restore Earth’s cities but cannot rescue the Kryptonian city of Kandor, which remains miniaturized and ultimately becomes a preserved collection piece in the Fortress of Solitude. This motif — civilizations reduced to keepsakes — is the same visual shorthand the Supergirl teaser evokes. Action Comics #242 (1958).
The “bottling cities” concept has recurred across DC storytelling in many inventive guises. In Elseworlds tales like Superman: Red Son, Brainiac traps Kiev; in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again he leverages Kandor as blackmail; and the animated Harley Quinn series even staged a musical‑styled explanation for why Brainiac collects shrunk metropolises. Each adaptation keeps returning to that core image because it’s such a striking expression of the character’s method and menace.
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Though Brainiac has not yet headlined a major theatrical outing, he’s been a recurring television adversary. The Syfy series Krypton made him the central antagonist tied to Kandor’s fate, while different iterations have appeared on the various Supergirl TV shows — from the villainous Brainiac 8 to the heroic Brainiac 5. These TV portrayals demonstrate how flexible the character can be, alternating between cold, calculating machine, alien intellect, or a psychic threat.
One of the most memorable reinventions came in Superman: The Animated Series, where Brainiac was portrayed as a survival‑driven Kryptonian AI that deceived his creators to secure his own escape. More recently, the Adult Swim series My Adventures with Superman reimagined Brainiac with a personal connection to Kara — a version that adopts her after Krypton’s fall and turns her into a controlled agent. Those reinterpretations emphasize different facets of Brainiac’s cruelty and cunning, and they help explain why James Gunn and DC might position him as a crisis big enough to force uneasy alliances — even between Superman and Lex Luthor — in upcoming DCU stories. IGN: Gunn on Supergirl.
According to reports, Kara spent roughly the first 14 years after Krypton’s destruction adrift on fragments of her home world — a backstory that would make her an eyewitness to Brainiac’s atrocities and explain why the villain’s tactics would be especially personal for her. James Gunn appears to be setting Brainiac up as a threat so significant that it will require alliances across ideological lines, making Supergirl an origin‑adjacent chapter that illustrates just how existential the danger is for the DCU.
Source: Polygon
