This past Wednesday marked the end of an era for Superman on film. Despite Henry Cavill having reprised the Man of Steel in Black Adam’s end-credits scene and later teased that there was more to come from his version of the character, the actor announced earlier this week that his time as Superman was officially over, On that same night, James Gunn, the new co-head of DC Studios, revealed that he’s writing a Superman reboot, and judging from what little the filmmaker has shared so far, it sounds like his take on the Kryptonian superhero is taking some cues from Matt Reeves’ The Batman.
While The Batman had once been conceived as a platform for Ben Affleck’s version of the shadowy vigilante, once Affleck stepped away from the project and Matt Reeves came aboard to write and direct, it transformed into a reboot that, while following Robert Pattinson as a younger Batman, was not an origin story. Instead, it showed the cape and cowled hero during his second year of crimefighting in Gotham City and having already built a rapport with Jeffrey Wright’s James Gordon. James Gunn looks to be following suit with his Superman reboot, because on top of having already said this won’t be an origin story either, he tweeted the following to someone who’d said that, “Him meeting people for the first time is an origin story”:
He's not meeting the major characters for the first time, either. He's merely younger.
James Gunn didn’t name any of these specific “major characters,” but we can infer that in this Superman reboot, people like Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Perry White are already part of Clark Kent’s life, as opposed to moviegoers being shown how he met them, like in Superman: The Movie and Man of Steel. Furthermore, this will be a Superman who already has experience protecting the innocent, but is far from being a veteran superhero. This sounds a lot like The Batman, doesn’t it?
Avoiding an origin story is a wise move on James Gunn’s part, as the general public is already quite familiar with Kal-El being launched off an exploding Krypton and being adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent on Earth, just like they’ve seen enough of Bruce Wayne’s parents being shot in Crime Alley and Peter Parker being bitten by a radioactive/genetically-altered spider. That being said, perhaps this Superman reboot could also follow in The Batman’s footsteps by showing Clark dealing with his first enhanced threat. With Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne having clashed with Paul Dano’s Riddler, maybe this new Superman will have to contend with someone like Lex Luthor, Brainiac or Parasite, i.e. someone who has more to offer than your standard criminal.
It’s hard to say when we’ll start learning concrete details about James Gunn’s Superman reboot, but if you’d like to stream past Superman movies, or even The Batman, you’ll need an HBO Max subscription. Our upcoming DC movies guide also lays out what this corner of the superhero movie market has coming up in the next year and beyond.
