Look up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a hackneyed opening line? No – it’s Superman (2025), James Gunn’s new blockbuster, which flew dashingly into cinemas last Friday. The film comes at a precarious time for blockbusters, arriving in a forbidding post-pandemic landscape where superhero movies, still ubiquitous, are no longer the bankable certainties they were a decade ago. If “superhero fatigue” is the phrase du jour when it comes to recent audience attitudes, then Gunn clearly didn’t get the memo.
Superman is as unapologetically comic book-ish as any film in recent memory, and promises much more to come. It heralds a complete overhaul of the DC Comics movie universe, following more than a decade of critically panned, commercially wavering releases, from Man of Steel (2013) through to The Flash (2023). Gunn, best known for directing Marvel’s much-loved Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, took over as co-chair of DC Studios in 2022, and is overseeing the new creative direction of the franchise himself.
