Superman might be faster than a speeding bullet, but thanks to another slogan he picked up in the 1940s, “Truth, Justice and the American Way,” he comes weighted down with more political baggage than any of his fellow superheroes — the kind that requires threading the needle in portraying this “visitor from another planet” as anything more than an indestructible Boy Scout.
The question of how to handle Superman on screen is more than just academic, with director and DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn’s movie about to hit theaters Friday, carrying the future of DC and in no small measure Warner Bros. Discovery on its broad shoulders.
Given past efforts to politicize the character, one might have thought that the studio wouldn’t want to do or say anything that might distract from the task at hand. Yet instead of shying away from such a fight, Gunn leaned into it in an interview over the weekend with the Times of London, saying Superman is fundamentally an immigrant story and about the value of human kindness, adding if “jerks out there” choose to be offended by that message, “screw them.”
Fox News’ panel show “The Five” piled on, naturally, labeling the movie “Superwoke” because the director embraced a “pro-immigration” stance, never mind the title character’s status as an undocumented visitor from another planet.
The Fox News criticism underscores the high degree of difficulty around relaunching “Superman,” a character whose trademark slogan echoes at a time when the definition of patriotism is hardly unanimous and Lex Luthor-like figures try wrapping themselves in the flag. And that’s before you take into account the mixed history of DC cinematic endeavors and parent WBD’s corporate divorce.
In that regard, Superman represents a sharp departure from his equally famous DC stablemate Batman, who, for all his orphaned angst, has always benefited from simplicity: Driven by his parents’ murder, Bruce Wayne becomes a costumed vigilante, pummeling and intimidating criminals.
After Tim Burton’s 1989 take on “Batman” brought the darker vision of the comics to the screen — and jettisoned the “Wham! Bang! Pow!” campiness of the 1960s TV show — the Dark Knight model, barring hiccups like the Joel Schumacher-directed sequels, has been pretty much cemented in place.
Superman, by contrast, has undergone various forms of reinvention complicated by those ready to take offense at anything that departs from their image of the character, usually exhibiting only modest awareness of its history and, not incidentally, a fair amount of bad faith.
Some of the blame for that can be traced to the phrase “Truth, Justice and the American Way,” which was introduced not in the comics but rather the Superman radio serial of the early 1940s, an appropriate-sounding slogan in the midst of World War II.
While the sentiment was understandable (Captain America was shown punching out Hitler in the comics during the same era), that motto saddled Superman — who is, after all, an American by the accident of his spaceship landing in Kansas — with a patriotic identity that ran counter to his role as a citizen of the world.
The slogan nevertheless followed Superman to television in the 1950s — he even stood in front of a waving flag in the credits — and hung over the character through the years.
The strength of that association meant DC caused a stir by seeking a more expansive designation of for whom and what the transplanted Kryptonian fought his never-ending battle. That included a minor uproar when Daily Planet editor Perry White asked Superman if he still stood for “truth, justice, all that stuff” in the 2006 movie “Superman Returns,” and a larger one after DC officially swapped in “Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow” in 2021, unleashing predictable tirades from conservative quadrants eager to bash Hollywood.
Fox News not surprisingly pounced on the change then, just as it did now, with contributor Raymond Arroyo saying at the time the studio would rather “politically grandstand and build foreign markets” than honor the character, calling the move a “disservice” to fans before adding, “You don’t need Kryptonite to kill Superman when you have DC Comics doing a great job.”
Where Batman has the advantage of feeling edgy, even brutal in later iterations, the knock on Superman has always been that he’s too corny, creating a higher hurdle in reaching a wide audience (and elusive young adults and teens) in cynical, polarized times.
But that’s why some have embraced Superman specifically for his old-fashioned values, welcoming the prospect of a lighter take after Zack Snyder’s more brooding rendition featuring Henry Cavill, first in “Man of Steel” — in which he consciously resisted becoming a tool of the U.S. government — and the “Justice League”-related films that followed.
Acknowledging that Superman could be “boring” (a sentiment recently echoed by actor Jon Hamm), The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols celebrated the Christopher Reeve version a few years ago by writing, “Whether we realize it or not, this is what we need right now. You can keep your antiheroes, your New York hipsters cracking wise with gods and presidents, your disturbed and conflicted brainiacs, and your waif-like, self-pitying meta-humans.” Nichols praised Reeve’s square-jawed heroism, including his pledge in “Superman II” never to let the president down again.
“We’re in free fall, and we need someone to catch us and then smile at our naiveté when we ask, in astonishment, how such a thing is even possible,” Nichols stated, contending that America needs “a hero who can be an example to a damaged country.”
Of course, this also follows far bleaker (and more gruesome) projects clearly derived from Superman, from the horror-tinged, Gunn-produced “Brightburn” — in which puberty and superpowers turn out to be a deadly combination — to Amazon’s superhero satire “The Boys,” where the character of Homelander embodies a grim warning of what might happen when bestowing Superman-like powers upon a malignant narcissist (insert your own parallel here).
Identifying Superman’s proper place in the modern world almost 90 years after Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created the comic book represents a complicated challenge for Gunn and Warner Bros. But given that the character enjoys a level of familiarity few can hope to match, it’s one where the potential benefits more than match the risks.
As for the landmines surrounding the franchise, including those ready — even eager — to be outraged by the slightest misstep or hint of “wokeness,” that’s now an unavoidable aspect of its DNA.
Such concerns might seem like an unfair burden on filmmakers whose principal mission is to deliver summer entertainment capable of justifying a reported $225-million budget that some have indicated could be significantly higher.
Yet while it’s possible to sympathize with the ancillary demands and noise, given Superman’s history, the best response might come from a somewhat obscure but beloved 1960s superhero satire, producer Jay Ward’s animated Super-Chicken: “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.”
