I thought I’d clocked every major swing James Gunn took with his 2025 take on Superman. The brighter tone. The emphasis on optimism. The quiet promise that this wasn’t going to be another grim reboot pretending hope was a liability. I watched closely. Or at least, I thought I had — until Gunn slipped in a Universe change so small, so nerdy, and so deeply rooted in the hit 2000s television show Smallville that it caught me entirely off guard.
In a response to a fan on Threads, Gunn confirmed that the decision to swap out the familiar “LexCorp” for “LuthorCorp” was a decision he directly credits to Smallville. The fan had written:
