Superman
2025 · James Gunn
Superman, a journalist in Metropolis, embarks on a journey to reconcile his Kryptonian heritage with his human upbringing as Clark Kent.
dir. James Gunn · 2025
The film that rebooted an entire cinematic universe, and did it by refusing the expected move: no origin story, no brooding. James Gunn — poached from Marvel to run DC's film slate outright — opens in medias res, with David Corenswet's Superman already three years into the cape and freshly knocked down, and builds outward into a Metropolis teeming with Silver Age furniture played straight: a superdog of dubious training, robot valets, pocket universes, a kaiju downtown. Where the Snyder era treated Superman as a burdened god, Gunn's thesis is almost defiantly modest — kindness as a radical position, decency as 'punk rock' — argued through a hero who stops mid-battle to shepherd a squirrel out of harm's way. Rachel Brosnahan's Lois Lane gets the film's best scene, a combative apartment interview that plays like screwball journalism ethics. Gunn's crowded-frame maximalism divides audiences as his films always have, but the gamble paid: the summer of 2025 made it the launchpad of the new DCU. John Murphy and David Fleming's score keeps circling John Williams's 1978 theme — inheritance acknowledged, then bent into a new key.
Lines of influence
- Superman: The Movie (1978) — Establishes the non-ironic, sincere Superman and the John Williams fanfare that this film literally reworks, plus Donner's 'verisimilitude' mandate of grounding the fantastic in a straight-faced world.
- Superman II (1980) — Sets the screwball Clark/Lois romantic-comedy rhythm and apartment/rooftop interview banter that Corenswet and Brosnahan revive as fast-traded overlapping dialogue.
- His Girl Friday (1940) — The rapid-fire, overlapping newsroom screwball cadence that models Lois Lane's fast-talking, interruption-driven reporter dialogue.
- Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) — Gunn's own house method: found-family ensemble blocking, needle-drop scoring, and abrupt pivots from comic bit to earnest sincerity within a single scene.
- The Suicide Squad (2021) — Supplies the crowded-frame maximalism and the city-scale kaiju (Starro) third-act climax that Gunn re-stages here with saturated comic-book color.
- Gojira (1954) — Provides the kaiju grammar—monster mass scaled against fleeing human figures and toppling architecture—that the film's giant-creature set pieces quote.
- The Iron Giant (1999) — The 'you are who you choose to be' thesis of an overpowered being electing gentleness, the direct craft template for decency-and-kindness-as-heroism.
- Superman: The Animated Series (1996) — The Silver Age revival design language—robot servants, crystalline/retro Fortress, primary-color optimism—that Gunn restores after the grimdark era.
- Man of Steel (2013) — The desaturated, collateral-heavy, brooding Superman that Gunn's bright, tactile, low-body-count 'anti-Snyder' staging is explicitly built in negative against.
- Superman Returns (2006) — The prior reverent attempt to revive Donner's tone by re-scoring with the Williams theme, an approach Gunn corrects by reworking rather than sampling the fanfare.
- Peacemaker (2022) — Gunn's adjacent DC work sharing the same needle-drop-and-sincerity tonal formula and rehabilitation of a mocked character through earnest interiority.
- Shazam! (2019) — Extends the same sincere, joyful, family-warmth counter-programming to grimdark DC, foregrounding wonder over dread.
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) — Shares crowded comic-panel maximalism—dense multi-figure frames and graphic pop lettering/color energy—as a way to make the page's density cinematic.
- Thor: Ragnarok (2017) — The auteur-comedy tonal reinvention of a self-serious hero via improv-flavored banter and bright synth/color palette.
- The Incredibles (2004) — Parallel Silver Age superhero-family sincerity and mid-century optimism, treating heroism as a domestic-moral vocation rather than trauma.
- Pacific Rim (2013) — Extends the earnest kaiju-versus-hero blockbuster spectacle, staging monster scale with sincere awe rather than ironic detachment.