We’re not that far out from the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League on HBO Max, which will see the return of Henry Cavill’s Superman. But as we’ve heard in the past, the Snyderverse is, at best, an Elseworld tangent. That leaves room for other sons of Krypton to exist. And now producer J.J. Abrams and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates are about to reboot Superman yet again. But what does this mean for Henry Cavill?
Deadline broke the news today, reporting that this new Superman will be produced under J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company. Undoubtedly a part of his creative pact with WarnerMedia, there’s not much many other details to divulge on this huge happening, except that producer Hannah Minghella is along for the ride as well. But already certain details here are bringing up threads of past conversations surrounding the protector of Metropolis, and those hypotheticals are exciting as anything.
The largest hypothetical, of course, is that with a prominent black writer like Ta-Nehisi Coates crafting his version of Superman’s mythos, there’s room for Michael B. Jordan to finally live out his fan’s dreams of playing both sides of Clark Kent’s story. Though with Coates penning the story, there’s no limit to who could end up playing the character, which is something that is refreshing. Even if it’s in the face of Henry Cavill really wanting to come back to the franchise.
Another reason this Superman reboot is such an interesting prospect is that for J.J. Abrams, it’s sort of a homecoming. Way back in the dark age between Christopher Reeve’s Superman franchise and the failed reboot that was Brandon Routh’s Superman Lives, there was a project called Superman: Flyby. That variant of Superman’s legacy was scripted by none other than Abrams himself, and had some interesting ideas it would have tackled. Whether J.J. Abrams will consult Ta-Nehisi Coates on including those ideas, or just leave this new reboot’s story to the man writing it, is yet to be seen.
A final question that comes to mind when puzzling out this new Superman story is what we’ll see in terms of this initial volume. Will we see Krypton exploding again, and flash through Clark Kent’s years as a child? Do we have to return to General Zod so soon, if ever? Or is a new, and lesser used baddie going to give us the shock of our lives, putting this Smallville farmboy to the test in a way we’ve never seen in live-action? As someone on Krypton probably wrote, in some philosophy book lost in the planet’s destruction, in the absence of answers, questions are the light that leads the way forward.
We’ll just leave things off on that note, as Superman’s exciting future lies ahead. Though, we’d be lying if we didn’t say we wanted some sort of Elseworlds story to come into the picture as well, so we can have both Henry Cavill and the next Superman both working at the same time. And the loser in a game of Chicken would have to fight Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam in the end; because you’ve gotta give the people what they want.
This poll is no longer available.
