You’re wrong: James Gunn’s Superman looks great

To say superhero films are in a rut is to understate how bad a state they’re in. Deadpool 3 was underwhelming, yet it was still the only superhero film released this year that wasn’t terrible. Its competition? Venom 3, Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter and Joker: Folie à Deux. 

2023 was a bit better, with Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse both being genuinely great. But otherwise? Ant-Man 3 was unwatchable. The Flash was horrific. The Marvels was aneurysm-inducing. Shazam! 2 was utterly forgettable. I did actually forget that Blue Beetle existed until I started writing this list. Oh yeah, and there was another Aquaman movie. It, like most of the films listed here, flopped. 

And yet, I’m genuinely pumped for James Gunn’s Superman, coming out next July. The teaser trailer was released online on Thursday, and I seem to be the only person who likes it. 

Colleagues variously described the trailer as “dogshit” or thought it looked “like bad TV.” Books editor Alexander Larman was particularly scathing: 

I was excited to see what James Gunn has done with Superman, one of the great American comic-book icons, but after watching this abject excuse for a teaser trailer, I was both disappointed and aghast. Zack Snyder might have been pilloried for his work on Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman, but both those films look like The Dark Knight compared to this ugly, cliché-riddled promo. I don’t know what was most ridiculous — the scene in which Superman summons his Super-Dog as if he was Roy Rogers calling for Tonto, the appearance of some enormous cave-troll fresh from a deleted scene of Lord of the Rings or the sheer pointless waste of it all. The 1978 film declared in its advertising “You’ll believe a man can fly.” Perhaps the promo for this should be “You’ll believe a director’s career can crash and burn.” 

Their sentiment is certainly the popular one. But I’m still holding out hope because the core of the film seems solid — and the weak parts of the trailer won’t necessarily seem poor in the final film. 

The start on those solid foundations: the cast seems excellent (including  

David Corenswet’s more emotive, younger Superman), and Gunn is an exceptionally talented director who also is a massive comics nerd. His style uniquely suits the heightened, absurd visuals of comic-accurate superheroes — and he’s not apologetic about them the way some other directors have been. 

I love the original X-Men films, but the cast all wore black leather outfits because Bryan Singer thought comic-accurate yellow would be too much. By contrast, The Guardians of the Galaxy was a very niche comic when Gunn started working on it, and his version was such a success in part because it kept the look and spirit of the comic. A gritty, grayed-out, generic sci-fi version of Guardians would have been quickly forgotten; and we know this because Eternals wasn’t that far off that. 

In turn, Gunn has spoken about how this Superman film takes directly from the original “Silver Age” Superhero comics; the period where Superman was told in a bright, hopeful way, and the books leaned into the science-fiction elements. It was goofy because it was a comic, and you could be, and it was bright and cheerful because who wants to wallow in dreariness? Gunn’s uniquely bringing that spirit to the screen and his willingness to use comic elements like Krypto the Dog and Mr. Terrific makes me more enthusiastic about this, not less. You can even see this in the glowing blue text and night-sky background of the trailer intertitles. I would be concerned if it were almost any other director, but with Gunn, these are good signs. 

Part of the hostile reception to the trailer is that our brains have been slightly broken by the aesthetics of comic book movies over the past decade. Namely, there are only a few genuinely great superhero films, and most of them — namely, The Dark Knight trilogy, Joker, Logan, The Batman, X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past — are visually and thematically dark films.  

By contrast, some of the most memorably awful superhero films of the last decade are light and bright — Thor: Love & Thunder, Batman & Robin, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace — and it’s easy to assume something from that. Comedies have long suffered a similar problem: bad comedies are worse than bad dramas because at least bad dramas can be funny, and good comedies are rarely seen as being as accomplished as good dramas.  

Never mind that Kraven the Hunter, Morbius, Fantastic Four and New Mutants were dark, gritty and terrible, or that Guardians of the Galaxy was bright, cheery, and brilliant; those don’t stand out as much. Similarly, you could be concerned by the number of superheroes in the trailer, but The Avengers had a large cast, was light and cheerful, and was a genuinely superb film.  

There are some visually unappealing stills from this film — notably, the CGI kaiju and Nathan Fillion’s ugly blonde bowl cut — but the same is true in many James Gunn films, and they work into the visual texture of his films. Zack Snyder’s aesthetic is a kind of dark brushed chrome — perfectly made, unemotive, made for still frames — but Gunn’s is more diverse, rough and splashy. He comes from ultra-low-budget, gory horror films, and though he’s dropped the blood — except in his recent Suicide Squad film and his incredible DC series, Peacemaker — he still keeps that charm.  

He’s also a very kinetic filmmaker and shots that look great in the full context of a scene often look ugly or straight when pulled from them. For example, the shot of Superman breaking through glass looks cheap and corny here, but I expect this to be a long-moving shot in the final picture, and I bet you it will look great. And again: a lot of it comes down to these characters being inherently goofy and that doesn’t fit well in a dramatic teaser trailer, but there’s no reason to think they won’t work in the full film. 

Also, a lot of the trailer does look visually outstanding. To list some of the best shots: the opening shots of Superman crashing into the ice, the shallow-focus shot of Clark rushing to work, a wide-angle shot of Clark walking through the offices, a close-up of his face in the snow, every shot of the farm; and then of course, the classic, comic-accurate Superman save. Many of these are similar to the best shots from Snyder’s Man of Steel, albeit with a bit more brightness and higher saturation — and many people overstate how pretty that film was because its visual highlights dominate our memory, and we try to ignore the dreary blurry slosh of the final twenty-minute fight scene. 

Is Superman guaranteed to be good? Of course not. But I’m remaining optimistic, and there’s a lot here that has me excited. “Truth, Justice, and the American Way?” Sign me up.