It’s on. Now the Hollywood writers’ strike is finally over, reports are beginning to percolate about various long-awaited projects. Chief among them is James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy, which according to Variety is now due to begin shooting in spring 2024. That means we can expect to hear the main cast moving into position in the coming months. David Corenswet has already been hired to play a younger man of steel, while Rachel Brosnahan will pick up Lois Lane’s Pulitzer-winning pen.
But what about other stalwarts of Superman’s world such as Lex Luthor, Martha and Jonathan Kent, Daily Planet editor Perry White and perhaps even Jimmy Olsen? How Gunn handles these characters will define how Legacy reimagines Metropolis and Smallville, and hopefully fuels the growth of the new DC Universe. One of the reasons fans initially gave Zack Snyder’s DCEU the time of day was that 2013’s Man of Steel offered a genuinely enticing vision of the most important superhero in the DC pantheon. Gunn now needs to repeat that trick, while avoiding the obvious failings of his predecessor when expanding into a spiderwebbed tapestry of interconnected superhero films.
Looking back, Man of Steel feels like a triumph of style over substance. Yet in 2013 it was still possible to imagine that behind Henry Cavill’s vapid yet statuesque performance lay the promise of future episodes in which we might witness the true glory of Superman; as if this new, pixel-perfect Kal-El, throwing fish into boats on the shores of the Pacific, represented the Kryptonian equivalent of Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile.
A few biffs and a whole lot of poisonous testosterone from Batman in the next movie, and it became apparent that there was nothing artistically interesting going on here at all, beyond Snyder’s ability to make the most prosaic of mise-en-scène shine like God’s bumhole thanks to the magic of filters, CGI and incredible digi-lighting.
His was a vision of Superman with Laurence Fishburne as White, Kevin Costner as Pa Kent and (in the execrable Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) Jesse Eisenberg as Luthor. How could it possibly go wrong?There’s no need to answer that question, because even the most ardent DC fans saw what happened in the intervening decade. It was enough to make some of us wonder if we even like comic book movies any more.
Still, the rumour is that Gunn will draw from the much-loved Jeph Loeb limited series run Superman for All Seasons when crafting the world of Legacy, which has to be a positive development. Does it give us much of a clue as to how Luthor, the Kents and other stalwarts of Superman’s universe will be represented? Perhaps not, but there is a sense that this new last son of Krypton will represent a return to the source rather than a radical reinvention. For All Seasons was designed to restore a sense of wonder in the classic Superman story, rather than rip up the rulebook and start again. Perhaps Gunn has something similar in mind for his big-screen take.
Snyder wanted to envisage the man of steel arriving into a world not so different from our own, imagining a Superman who wouldn’t look out of place in the then supremely popular Christopher Nolan Batman movies. But instead of an equivalent to the Dark Knight trilogy we got subsequent episodes which tried to make up for a lack of substance with spectacular visuals and plenty of blood, bile and thunder.
Gunn, first signs suggest, has something different planned. Roll on 2024, and a chance to see the big blue boy scout soar once again – perhaps without any real requirement to be reinvented according to the current zeitgeist. Maybe, just maybe, the true, original Superman, that primary-coloured emblem of all-American hope, with pants outsidehis tights in full effect, is the one we all need right now.
