Over the years, a handful of brave actors have donned the red and blue costume as Superman, often paying respect to what came before. For director James Gunn, however, his focus wasn’t on making the Kryptonian he had in mind fall in line with the rest.
During a special presentation of the brand new trailer for “Superman” attended by /Film’s own Bill Bria, Gunn confessed that the legacy of what came before was on his mind, but it wasn’t part of his agenda. “Because the truth for me is I didn’t come in here to write a ‘Superman’ movie and say, ‘Oh, I want to honor this and honor that, and also be new and open to the fans.’ Those are thoughts I had along the way of writing the script originally and along the path of making the movie,” as the filmmaker and co-architect of the DC Universe reboot recalled. “But for me, I wanted to tell a story that excited me and moved me and felt authentic.”
Even so, Gunn is still a fan of Kal-El’s previous live-action iterations and didn’t totally ignore the hero’s history on screen. “Some of it was, and some of the stuff that you see in the trailer here. But I knew that I wanted to have a Superman that stayed true to his origins of being the ultimate good guy,” as Gunn put it. That might sound like an old-fashioned description for the Man of Tomorrow, but in Gunn’s eyes, it’s one that’s very much needed in our present.
Superman is a force for good in a world that doesn’t have much of it
As Marlon Brando’s Jor-El puts it in Richard Donner’s 1978 “Superman” movie, “They 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.” As central as that idea is to the Man of Steel, though, there have been certain Superman films that have noticeably skimmed over it. However, when it came to David Corenswet’s iteration of the Big Blue Boy Scout, Gunn made sure this element was fundamental to the superhero and the movie around him. “And I think that it was a movie about kindness. It was a movie about being good,” Gunn assured the journalists at the press event.
He wasn’t alone in this mindset, either. According to the “Guardians of the Galaxy” filmmaker, he and the “Superman” cast talked (and agreed) about this over dinner before shooting had even begun. “And at the end of the day, the world doesn’t always seem to have so much good in it, and this movie has to truly be that. And for it to truly be that means that we had to be good to each other,” Gunn explained. “We had to be good to the crew, and that it had to be that authentically. And so for me, the movie’s about that more than anything else.” You can find out just how much good there really is in “Superman” when the movie soars into theaters on July 11, 2025.