Remember when all the DC superheroes on screen were dark and depressing? Ten years ago, in 2015, two years after the release of Man of Steel and one year before Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, if you were getting your DC superheroes exclusively from the movie theater, the tone, color palette, and overall vibe were dreary, bordering on stoic. This isn’t to say Zack Snyder’s vision for Batman, Superman, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman was wrong, per se, but the current, new DCU under James Gunn strikes an unapologetically upbeat tone. Even the dark turns of Peacemaker Season 2 were tempered with a ton of fun, and of course, the 2025 film Superman asserted a new basic battle cry for DC superheroes: What if being nice was the real punk rock?
And, while this all might seem like a new, swift change for live-action DC, the truth is, the foundation for a mega-popular, gee-whiz, upbeat take on DC, and people from the planet Krypton in particular, happened a decade ago. On October 26, 2015, Melissa Benoist took to the skies as Supergirl, in a TV take on the DC mythos that was even more wholesome than David Corenswet’s recent take on Superman.
