Now that the DC Universe is underway thanks to the release of Creature Commandos Season 1 to Max subscription holders (and yes, Season 2 is on the way), the next step for this franchise is to release its first movie. James Gunn’s Superman has that honor, with David Corenswet’s turn as the Man of Steel slated for a summer release on the 2025 movies schedule. And yet, with half a year to go until this upcoming DC movie’s arrival, Warner Bros. Discovery has been hit with a major lawsuit over its release.
The estate of Joe Shuster, who co-created Superman in the late 1930s with Jerry Siegel, is suing WBD, and by extension DC Comics, is claiming in a lawsuit filed today in Federal Court in the Southern District of New York that Superman does not have the rights to be released in certain territories around the globe. As passed along by Deadline, Plaintiff Mark Warren Peary, the Shuster estate’s executor, is seeking “damages and injunctive relief for Defendants’ ongoing infringement in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia, as well as declaratory relief establishing the Shuster Estate’s ownership rights across relevant jurisdictions.”
It’s noted in the article that this isn’t the first time that Peary has legally sparred with Warner, with the last time revolving around termination issues under the U.S. Copyright Act, this time its foreign copyright that’s being brought forward. It’s explained in the lawsuit that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sold the worldwide rights to Superman in 1938, the year the character debuted in the pages of Action Comics #1, to Detective Comics Inc., DC’s predecessor, for $130 ($65 each). The suit goes on to say that “the copyright laws of countries with the British legal tradition—including Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia—contain provisions automatically terminating such assignments 25 years after an author’s death, vesting in the Shuster Estate the co-author’s undivided copyright interest in such countries.”
With Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel having died in 1992 and 1996, respectively, the suit states that “Shuster’s foreign copyrights automatically reverted to his estate in 2017 in most of these territories,” with the exception of Canada, which was in 2021. Now Warner Bros. Discovery and DC is being accused of exploiting Superman “across these jurisdictions without the Shuster Estate’s authorization,” which includes film, TV and merchandise, despite the copyright laws in these countries. A jury trial is being requested in the lawsuit, and the Shuster estate is also seeking a cease and desist order from the court in the meantime.
This suit arrives a little over a month after the first Superman trailer premiered, and less than a week after a 30-second Superman promo dropped that required some clearing up from James Gunn. The timing on this certainly isn’t ideal, and if the DC movie couldn’t be released in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia, needless to say that would be a major blow to its box office performance. Warner Bros. Discovery will surely start taking action to ensure the lawsuit is dealt with as swiftly as possible so as not to impact one of its biggest movies of the year.
Superman flies into theaters on July 11, but we’ll keep our eyes and ears out for any updates on what ends up happening with this legal dispute. David Corenswet is joined in the movie by Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Wendell Pierce, Skyler Gisondo, Nathan Fillion, Isabela Merced, Edi Gathegi and Anthony Carrigan, among many others.
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