The brand new DC Universe has somehow run out of ideas, even before it has really got going. They’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel, then dug through it, and found another, much deeper barrel underneath, where they have unexpectedly discovered a pooch in a cape. For rumour suggests that Krypto the Superdog, the man of steel’s very own four-legged, flight-capable, laser-eyed friend, will soon be making an appearance in James Gunn’s forthcoming Superman: Legacy. Yes, we’ve gone from the Nietzschean ubermensch of Zack Snyder’s navel-gazing, grimdark reboot to a doggy hero who spends most of his time saving the multiverse in between belly rubs and peeing on Lex Luthor’s battle suit, in just a few years.
Speaking on an episode of the Capes and Lunatics Podcast, Superman comic writer Mark Waid revealed that the superpowered mutt will be making his big screen debut in next year’s DCU party starter, which will star David Corenswet as Kal-El, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult as Luthor, and quite possibly at this rate Kristen Wiig as the voice of Sparkle the Wonderkitty. Waid said:
I like Gunn’s reverential approach by and large to this kind of stuff, and you know reverential without taking it too seriously. I mean, the movie has a dog in it, a superpowered dog with heat vision.
If any other director than Gunn was attempting to pull this off, it would be decried as a lazy, myopic return to an era in which superhero movies were little more than throwaway, infantilised dross designed to sell a few more toys to six-year-olds. And yet this is the film-maker who brought us Rocket Raccoon – a maniacal gun-toting, talking procyonid with more childhood trauma than Harley Quinn has questionable life choices – and Groot, a monosyllabic talking tree, to the Marvel universe. If he wants to bring us a superpowered canine who can catch missiles in his teeth and hurl tennis balls into alternate dimensions, who are we to suggest this is likely to be anything but a win?
There’s something seriously irreverent, not to mention outright brave about going this far out into cosmic nuttiness, because if Gunn gets it wrong, he’ll be staring down the barrel of a speculated $360m-budget bazooka of shame. He’ll never live this down, because what kind of film-maker, when faced with the prospect of trying to make the first really decent Superman film in the best part of half a century, would choose to hamstring themselves by including a flying labrador retriever sidekick who still panics at the sight of the vacuum cleaner despite having the power to take out Darkseid with a single paw?
The answer is a film-maker with supreme confidence in their own ability to make the right creative choices, and that at least should be a reason for comfort.
Legacy is said to be inspired by the mid-noughties comic book All-Star Superman, which reimagined Kal-El through a timelessly reverential, all-American golden-era prism. Of early ideas for what eventually became the series run, writer Grant Morrison described an intention “to restore Superman to his pre-eminent place as the greatest superhero of all,” which sounds an awful lot like the challenge facing Gunn after decades of middling to weak films about DC’s most powerful costumed titan.
Still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the inclusion of Krypto may be less of a creative stroke of genius and more a symptom of the DCU’s ongoing identity crisis. It’s almost as if Gunn has looked at Batman v Superman and Man of Steel, films that tried (and often failed) to wrestle with grandiose themes of godhood, alienation, and moral responsibility, and thought: “What this really needs is less pathos – and more dog.”
Perhaps he’s right. At the very least, Krypto’s existence in Legacy means we’re almost certainly going to avoid the kind of Superman movie in which the man of steel spends most of his time battling moody existential crises in slow motion while wearing a suit darker than the go-to sartorial choices of a 1987 Sisters of Mercy fan. And for that, we should probably be thankful, even if this does initially feel like the most baffling pet-related cinematic decision since Cats went CGI.
