Can you hear them? The voices are chanting, and they’re chanting a name that should make me sigh in despair, but instead, fills me with hope and longing.
Superman!
After over a decade of miserably received, underperforming, and disappointing adaptations of DC Comics superheroes, after ousters and shake-ups and multiple false starts, it finally, finally seems as though the head-honchos over at Warner Brothers-Discovery have found someone capable and well-suited to a colorful, fun, and thoughtful shared universe for adaptations of the stable of timeless, beloved characters they own.
Originally titled Superman: Legacy, James Gunn, the pop-punk genius who graduated from directing low-brow fare like Troma’s sex and gore-filled Tromeo and Juliet (1996) and the splatter-punk masterpiece Slither (2006) to headlining massive crowd-pleasing franchise tentpoles like Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), decided to rename his film to just Superman. As Gunn sees it, this new movie will get at the heart of just who the character of Superman is, while looking forward to the future; the “Legacy” part of the trailer felt too reflective of the past, and when we’re revamping the core of a legend to be relatable to a new era, well, who needs that?
It’s hard, as someone who feels very close to this genre, to feel excited for superhero media from the big two these days. Marvel seemed to be taken over by the Masters of Evil for a second there, with their TV shows either being completely superfluous or just plain bad, while theatrical offerings like The Marvels (2023) or the horrific Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) (featuring my favorite Marvel character, the god of thunder himself) had me wondering why I still cared at all.
And then there’s the insanity of what DC Entertainment had to offer from the dour, post-9/11 trauma inducing Man of Steel (2013), all the way down to the bizarre, painfully, agonizingly unfunny and overlong The Flash (2023). Forget the Masters of Evil or the Legion of Doom, it seemed as if for over a decade, the suits in charge of the DC superhero movie universe were all under the spell of Darkseid’s anti-life equation.
At this point, people with an affinity for these types of stories (read: geeks, nerds, comic book aficionados etc) have turned to other properties for the uplifting, epic tales of heroes and villains, of loss and betrayal, of victory and sorrow, featuring characters in elaborate costumes and amazing names. I’m talking about the WWE, of course, and also, and more pertinently, about independent super hero properties like The Boys, produced by Amazon, but based on a comic book by the one and only Garth Ennis, and Amazon’s other gem, Invincible, which is easily one of the best examples of the genre.
Amidst all this carnage, the unthinkable happened. James Gunn, fired temporarily from Disney for some old tweets, got snagged up by Warner Bros, wasted no time in handing the keys of the kingdom to him. And his first order of business? This year’s new Superman iteration. There’s a sequence in the trailer that played during the Superbowl, as Lois Lane angrily criticizes his selfless actions, he falls from a hundred stories, crashing into the pavement. And then we hear it. People calling his name, chanting it even, crying out for help. It’s so simplistic and beautiful that I’m just left here wondering why it was so hard to pull this off for the past decade.
Can you hear? Superman is coming! And this time, he has a fluffy, adorable dog with him. Metropolis is a colorful, vibrant world that feels like the idealistic form our own cities can be, and there is a world of heroes and villains just waiting to react to this new, youthful, and unambiguously heroic Superman, right along with us.
Superman is releasing on July 11th, 2025, and people are excited about it! Are you looking forward to this new direction for movies starring DC superheroes? Let us know in the comments!
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