James Gunn’s ‘Superman’ is great because its Superman is good
The DCU begins with a bang. PLUS: The third ‘Dune’ movie loses its ‘Messiah,’ Jon M. Chu takes the wheel for ‘Hot Wheels,’ and Larry David teams up with ... Barack Obama?
Happy 7-Eleven Day, Popculturology readers. Hopefully Slurpee Claus was good to you all and left a pile of Taquitos under the giant Big Gulp you keep in your living room. (I swear this edition of Popculturology is not sponsored by 7-Eleven. I just have a bunch of fun memories of biking to the gas station and buying a Slurpee and snacks when I was a kid.)
The world might be falling apart, but at least Chuck E. Cheese is opening a series of arcades for adults. (The fancy mall in Rochester is getting one of the first locations.) I have so many questions. Do they serve beer like they do at a normal Chuck E. Cheese? If you outdrink Chuck E., do you play the games for free? If he outdrinks you, does he get to escape the timeless prison that is Chuck E. Cheese forcing you to become the new Chuck E. in his place?
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The DCU lifts off with Superman
While I’m not old enough to have seen Superman: The Movie in theaters when it released in 1978, this is somehow my third time sitting in a theater watching a new actor don the Superman cape.
I was there for a midnight screening of Superman Returns when Brandon Routh took on the role in 2006.
I was there for a midnight screening of Man of Steel when Henry Cavill took on the role in 2013.
And now I was there for an, um, 9:25 p.m. screening of Superman when David Corenswet took on the role in 2025. (I miss the thrill of a midnight premiere.)
That third time might finally be the charm when it comes to getting the Man of Steel right on the big screen. Which isn’t an easy task. The challenge to adapting Superman for the movies over the past few decades has apparently been that he’s just too good. There’s different ways to tackle that challenge.
If you’re director Bryan Singer, you try to lean into the Christopher Reeves/Richard Donner vibes of the original Superman movies with Superman Returns. If you’re director Zack Snyder, you create your own version of the character that eschews that goodness with Man of Steel. And if you’re James Gunn — burdened with the mighty task of launching a new superhero cinematic universe — you finally make a Superman movie that understands that he’s great because he is good.
If Superman does nothing else right, it’s embrace of that idea — once again, that Superman is great because he is good — that cements this movie as one of the character’s best outings in addition to being a timely text for the current world.
After the Snyderverse version of the DCEU sputtered out, Gunn and Peter Safran were brought on board by Warner Bros. to head up DC Studios and relaunch the cinematic universe as the DCU. While many attempts to mimic the Marvel Cinematic Universe have tried to copy the Iron Man model of building a megafranchise piece by piece, character by character, film by film, Gunn launches the DCU with a bang through Superman.
According to the film’s beginning text, superheroes have been around for three centuries. This isn’t a world just learning of their existence. Not only do metahumans exist, but Superman has already been on the job for three years. It’s a novel choice by Gunn to jump in like this — Superman often feels like a sequel to a film that doesn’t exist — but immediately shakes off the weight of having to build a cinematic universe from the ground up. The DCU already exists, and Superman is one part of it.
Finding the right actor to play Superman is always a tough search. I think both Routh and Cavill were ill served by the films they were featured in. Corenswet is both a fantastic Superman and Clark Kent. (I do question his journalist ethics, though.) He often reminded me of the version of Brendan Fraser who we once saw in movies like The Mummy, even down to his speech patterns. I had assumed that Corenswet was a British actor and he was doing an American voice that just happened to sound like Fraser, but nope — the guy was born in Philadelphia.
While Superman is in no way the revolutionary shock to the cinematic system that Iron Man was back in 2008, it’s a fun movie infused with the heart that we’ve come to expect from Gunn. I look forward to seeing where the DCU goes from this point, and I hope to see more of Corenswet as Superman in the future.
