2026's Supergirl Movie Will Officially Introduce DC's Own Wolverine (With a Twist)

The 2026 Supergirl movie is bringing one of DC Comics' most chaotic characters to the big screen for the first time, and longtime readers spent decades calling him the company's answer to a certain clawed Marvel mutant. Jason Momoa is playing Lobo, the cigar-chomping, motorcycle-riding Czarnian bounty hunter who shows up in the new film alongside Milly Alcock's Kara Zor-El, marking his live-action DCU debut in James Gunn and Peter Safran's rebooted slate.

With Supergirl heading to theaters on June 26, the film is set to formally introduce a character fans have nicknamed DC's evil Wolverine for years. The comparison is not a stretch either. Lobo's co-creator, Keith Giffen, said outright that he created the character as a jab at the ultraviolent antihero archetype that Wolverine helped popularize, and the visual and behavioral overlap between the two has only grown since. Now, with Momoa stepping into the role on screen, this long-running comparison is about to take center stage in front of a much wider audience. 

Lobo first appeared in Omega Men #3 in June 1983, created by writer Roger Slifer and artist Keith Giffen. He started life as a hardened villain, fell out of fashion, then exploded in popularity in the early 1990s after a four-issue miniseries titled Lobo: The Last Czarnian by Giffen, Alan Grant, and artist Simon Bisley. This run reframed him as a foul-mouthed bounty hunter with a healing factor, a cigar in his teeth, and a customized space motorcycle called the Spacehog. 

How Similar Are Wolverine & Lobo?

The surface similarities between the two characters are obvious. Both Lobo and Wolverine are short on patience and long on grudges, prefer a bar fight to a conversation, and spend a lot of panel time on a motorcycle with a cigar lit.

Lobo's feral, biker-gang look, with the chalk-white skin, wild black hair, leather and chains, feels like a grimier, blown-out version of Wolverine's gruff loner energy. Both characters can take a beating that should kill them and walk it off, thanks to absurdly powerful regenerative abilities. They work as guns for hire who answer mostly to themselves, drifting in and out of hero teams when the money or the fight is good enough.

What pushes Lobo into evil-Wolverine territory is the body count. Wolverine has plenty of blood on his claws, but he still fights for the X-Men and pulls his punches when civilians are in the room. Lobo, on the other hand, wiped out his entire home planet of Czarnia, the peaceful utopia he was born on, by unleashing a swarm of engineered scorpion-like creatures on his own people. He calls himself the Main Man, sees a contract as a contract, and has no interest in the moral lines Logan still tries to hold. He's basically the version of that archetype with the brakes cut.

Interestingly, DC and Marvel have leaned into the comparison themselves. The two characters squared off in the 1996 DC vs. Marvel crossover event, with Wolverine taking the win in a fan-voted bout that critics have argued ever since should have gone the other way, given Lobo's extreme healing factor and raw strength. 

More recently, the publishers paired their universes again in Marvel/DC: Batman/Deadpool, which produced a fused Amalgam character called Logo who literally smashes Wolverine and Lobo into one figure.

How Does Lobo Fit Into Supergirl's Story?

Lobo doesn't appear in Tom King and Bilquis Evely's original Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow comic, the eight-issue series Supergirl is based on. James Gunn said the character was added during the adaptation to help give the script a tighter three-act shape, and he's called Lobo the biggest comic book character who has never been in a movie. 

King also pointed out that his original pitch for the comic was a Supergirl and Lobo team-up, so the Czarnian's presence here is closer to the writer's first instinct than it might look.

Director Craig Gillespie described Supergirl as a road movie spanning nine worlds, with a darker tone than Superman and clear influences from Logan and John Wick. This tone fits Lobo perfectly. Kara is on a vengeance journey with Ruthye Marye Knoll, a young alien girl played by Eve Ridley, hunting down Krem of the Yellow Hills, played by Matthias Schoenaerts. Dropping a brash, regenerating bounty hunter into the mix brings more excitement and brutality to the journey. 

Momoa has been publicly pursuing this role for years. His casting was confirmed in December 2024, and the first official look arrived in early 2026 in the Supergirl teaser. Viewers then got a clearer look at the character in another teaser, which showed Momoa stepping out of his trailer with fangs before cutting to him in costume. DC's evil Wolverine will play an anti-villain role in Kara's journey, contributing heavily to the biggest space adventure of Summer 2026.