“You’ll believe a man can fly.” —advertising tagline for Richard Donner’s Superman, 1978
Lex Luthor is right: Superman must be destroyed.
That’s the message I took away from the first half of James Gunn’s Superman reboot, which is dollar-for-dollar possibly the worst movie of 2025. I’m sure there are worse films this year, but probably none that cost an estimated $225 million to produce (actual budget of $260-$300 million minus tax incentives), and perhaps an almost unbelievable $200 million in global marketing costs.
With a global box office of $615 million — of which the studio gets maybe half — Warner Bros. likely lost money on the theatrical run, and must be praying fervently that downstream revenue might someday put them into the black.
I’m not here to review Superman, or even Richard Donner’s 1978 classic, starring the late, great, unsurpassable Christopher Reeve. But you and I will talk about both movies today, because we always need heroes — and when it comes to the original superhero, Hollywood’s been letting us down for more than 40 years.
So let’s discuss where Gunn’s take went wrong, and what kind of Superman the world really needs.
The fundamental problem today is that Gunn doesn’t understand what Superman was, is, and must be: Jesus by way of Moses.
No, I’m not kidding.
But stick a pin in that thought, because I’ll come back to it — and the brilliant 1978 version that wasn’t afraid of Superman’s religious subtext — after I’m done vivisecting the Gunn movie.
First, the good.
Superman‘s dialogue is sharp, the acting is solid and generally well-cast, and Gunn smartly dispensed with Kal-El’s (baby Superman) origin story. Audiences can go a few decades between needing to see Krypton blow up, Peter Parker get bitten by a radioactive spider, or Bruce Wayne’s parents get murdered one more damn time.
When Gunn’s movies work — think Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 — they work brilliantly. So why did this snappy, well-acted movie completely fail for me?
Myriad reasons, including the fact that Superman isn’t the hero of his own movie; this Man of Steel spends more time getting rescued than doing the rescuing. Gunn’s inclusion of the “Justice Gang” is annoying and unnecessary. And Gunn’s attempt to put a 1950s “Silver Age” Superman on the big screen falls flat for one big reason I’ll get back to momentarily, but also for at least one small reason: Krypto, the cape-wearing super-dog. A flying dog might have worked in Baby Boomer-era comics, but it sure doesn’t on film. Also, this version of Krypto is a jerk.
If you haven’t seen the new movie, here’s a big spoiler: The plot twist is that Gunn’s Superman was sent to Earth by his doomed Krypton parents, Lara and Jor-El, to conquer humanity and out-breed us with a super-harem of sex slaves.
Seriously.
Clark never knew any of this, however. The video message with Jor-El’s instructions to rule the Earth got corrupted during baby Kal-El’s voyage to Earth, so all Clark ever saw was the happy introduction before Jor-El got to the “CONQUER AND BREED!” part. But then Lex breaks into the Fortress of Solitude, decodes the rest of the message, and publishes it to tarnish Superman’s image.
But there’s less here than meets the eye. The discovery of Jor-El’s full message didn’t really do anything to Superman’s character arc, and ended up as little more than a PR stunt for Lex to justify destroying Superman, and that’s something he was trying to do, regardless. Gunn viciously retconned Clark’s backstory — for nothing..
Jor-El and Lara deserved so much better from Gunn, and Superman’s defense is basically, “But I didn’t know! I thought I had nice parents!”
But that’s not the reason he has to go.
If Gunn wanted a Silver Age Superman movie, fine, but his Silver Age movie stars a modernized Clark Kent, yet never fully acknowledges the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court element. Clark is either comically square or just a nice GenZ dude, and I never got a handle on who he was supposed to be. It’s a 1950s Superman world — except when it isn’t — but Gunn gave us a GenZ Clark.
’50s Superman was very much like Christopher Reeve’s portrayal in Donner’s 1978 movie: impossibly earnest, honest, decent, and — perhaps most importantly of all, unflappable.
Which brings us to this Superman’s fundamental problem: he can’t even control his nasty little dog. Gunn’s Superman, played amiably enough by David Corensweeth, just doesn’t have his s*** together.
And we — the whole Earth — can’t have that.
The initial teaser-trailer looked promising, but when Warner released this extended clip, my Bad Movie antennae started twitching like David Byrne on Red Bull.
Here’s the scene:
First, you might have noticed what I meant earlier about the solid performances and the snappy dialogue. Kudos to Corensweeth and Rachel Brosnahan for their performances, and to Gunn for his assured direction. As soon as her casting was announced, I predicted Brosnahan would prove to be my favorite Lois Lane since Margot Kidder — and she is.
Second… that… is… not… Superman. Or at least, not a Superman we can trust with superpowers.
And Another Thing: I’d also add that while Nicholas Hoult — a fine actor — does what he can with Lex, the character is badly written, and again, poorly understood by Gunn. This Lex is a youngish tech bro who’s basically a brat, and mad at Superman for eclipsing Lex in the public eye.
If Clark gets frustrated and flustered by a couple of pointed questions from his girlfriend, what’s he going to do when the stakes are much higher? Humanity doesn’t have the answer to that question, and maybe we can’t afford to find out. If Lex wants to imprison this version of Superman in a pocket dimension, it might just be for the best.
Seriously, somebody please sprinkle trace amounts of Kryptonite on his Wheaties every morning. Just enough to hobble him. Because if this is the best Superman we’ve got… Lex might be right.
If Donner had directed this same scene with Reeve and Kidder, Reeve would have given his trademark smirk, and very gently corrected her with something like, “I saved lives, Lois. That’s what I do. Politics is for the politicians, but we’re all on the same team.”
Gunn set up the perfect opportunity to set up his Superman as unflappable and incorruptible — two of the character’s most essential ingredients — but chose instead to show him as a guy who doesn’t seem to know quite what he’s doing.
Gunn’s Superman is a very nice, modern guy. But morally speaking, he never seems to be much more than that. A nearly invincible meta-human of incredible powers must be so much more…
…or Lex Luthor is right.
The Superman mess is almost enough to make me feel badly for Warner Bros. They got caught on the back foot by the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Iron Man, Avengers, etc.) and flailed around without direction with a series of wildly uneven movies. In Gunn, Warner thought they had a writer-director-producer with the singular vision needed to reboot the entire DC Comics universe, starting with Superman.
The surface-level problem is that Gunn’s one and only comfort zone is in Guardians of the Galaxy-type “band of misfits” stories, which hardly suits the Man of Steel. Worse, his taste is just shockingly bad sometimes.
A few examples:
- Authored “The 50 Superheroes You Most Want To Have Sex With,” since scrubbed, but went to some pretty dark places — trust me.
- Guardians Vol. 3 featured extended sequences of captive, surgically altered anthropomorphized talking baby animals being experimented on.
- Supergirl is now a drunken party girl.
- 2021’s Suicide Squad, almost in its entirety. Better than the 2016 version, but still an R-rated display of sensibilities ill-suited to Superman.
- Peacemaker Season 2’s first episode included a hard-R orgy with male and female full frontal nudity.
- And Peacemaker ties in with the Gunn’s supposedly kid-friendly Superman, believe it or not. Who is any of this supposed to be for?
Although to be fair, Gunn’s darker sensibilities are perfectly tailored to his underappreciated 2010 superhero deconstructed movie, Super, starring Rainn Wilson from The Office.
Deconstruction can be fun and all, particularly in a movie genre that’s been overdone in recent years.
But Superman’s story is so Biblical that you can’t deconstruct it without destroying it.
To see what I mean, let’s look at Clark’s My Two Dads backstory. There’s his earthly father, Jonathan Kent, and his (holy?) ghost father, Jor-El, both played in the Donner movie to near-perfection by Glenn Ford and Marlon Brando, respectively.
Ford’s screen-time is minimal and impactful. In just 65 seconds, Ford shows us the kind of man Jonathan was, and the kind of man he taught Clark to be:
If you didn’t watch all three minutes, Jonathan dies immediately after this walk-and-talk with Clark, followed by a Clark’s discovery of a mysterious green crystal that calls him away from Kansas.
And Another Thing: In Gunn’s movie, the Kents appear to have IQs around 70, ridiculous Southern accents, and shout into their phones as though they don’t understand how they work.
When the Donner-Reeve version of Clark, age 18 or so, discovers the Fortress of Solitude and begins receiving a Kryptonian education from recordings made by his birth father, Jor-El, screenwriter Mario Puzo made the Christ imagery explicit.
“Live as one of them, Kal-El, to discover where your strength and your power are needed,” Jor-El advised his son. “Always hold in your heart the pride of your special heritage. [Humanity] can be a great people, Kal-El; they wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you… my only son.”
Godlike creature who appears in ghostly form to tell his only son to show humanity the way? In one story, Superman even died for us.
For all its flaws — almost entirely in the third act — Donner’s ’78 Superman understood and made plain Kal-El’s almost Christlike nature. It isn’t that Superman is stronger than we are, although he certainly is. It’s that he’s better than we are, essentially perfect.
Superman makes us want to be better people because he’s just so damned darned good.
I can’t remember anyone ever exploring the Moses angle but, c’mon. Lara and Jor-El stuck their baby son alone in a spaceship (a high-tech stand-in for Moses’s basket of reeds) with hopes of giving him a better life.
And Another Thing: Superman’s creators were a couple of Jewish guys, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who knew exactly what they were doing — both with Kal-El’s Moses-like beginnings and Superman’s Messiah-like power to inspire.
There’s also the matter of timing. Chris Reeve was that Silver Era Superman, brought to us by Donner in the malaise era ’70s — just when we needed him most.
I want you to watch the best 48 seconds of Superman ever put to film. Clark has only just recently arrived in Metropolis — after disappearing for 12 years, from age 18 to 30 (cough, cough) — and decides to make his Superman debut when he sees Lois in peril.
The movie posters in 1978 promised us, “You’ll believe a man can fly.” And we did. Not because the special effects were perfect, because they weren’t. They were groundbreaking, and (just) good enough to let audiences suspend their disbelief. But we believed because Reeve made us believe.
So Superman catches Lois midair and says, “Easy, miss, I’ve got you.” On one level, it’s a great laugh line when Lois shouts, “You’ve got me? [Looks down, sees nothing] Who’s got you?” But it works on a deeper level when Superman replies with nothing but a cocky smile and an amused “Hmph.”
The “Of course I’ve got you. I’m Superman” is implied. That’s all it ever needed to be. Because he’s Superman.
That same night, he takes time off from saving Air Force One and stopping various armed robbers to rescue a little girl’s cat stuck in a tree. The Donner/Reeve Superman does it all with a smile and a moment of reassurance for everyone he meets.
But producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind fired Donner after the first movie, and despite Reeve’s continued presence, the sequels went quickly downhill. Despite repeated attempts, there hasn’t been a great Superman movie in almost 50 years.
If I’m being brutally honest about the original (and still my favorite) superhero, Superman can be a bore, dramatically speaking. Iron Man Tony Stark is brilliant, but also an egotist alcoholic. Bruce Wayne is forever haunted by the murder of his parents. Even a superhero made movie famous by Gunn — Peter “Star-Lord” Quill — was abducted by aliens and struggles to understand his true origin and his place in the galaxy.
These are characters that any decent writer can sink their teeth into.
Then there’s Kal-El/Clark Kent, raised by decent Midwestern folks and descended from virtual gods. There isn’t much there for all but the most talented of screenwriters to work with, and it probably helps if, like Puzo, they’re steeped in religious tradition.
That’s why viewers still return to the 1978 Superman in ways I doubt they will for Gunn’s 2025 take.
Mario Puzo — who also authored The Godfather — understood that Superman’s story required a Biblical sweep. Richard Donner’s storytelling skills and famously lighthearted touch were exactly what were needed to make a comic-book movie that was grounded in the real world. And Christopher Reeve’s combination of sweetness and confidence brought humanity to a virtual god, without sticking him with feet of clay.
We need heroes who aren’t just strong, but good. We want “Truth, justice, and the American way,” and we want them from someone who is just as decent as he is powerful.
Audiences don’t want to if they ought to side with Lex. We shouldn’t have to worry whether Superman ought to be destroyed.
Look up in the sky, Hollywood, and try to find those stories again.
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