None of us can escape our natures, so here are my Superman (2025) teaser reactions
I straight-up said on Bluesky that I wasn’t gonna publicly say much but as they say on 2024’s most beloved crime drama, The Penguin,* you are you who are and you couldn’t change if you tried. And I am a small child who is also dumb, and there is a trailer for a new Superman movie.
(* Highly recommend checking out my good friend Maxwell Grant’s annotations of and further commentary on the series, which came in part of our many conversations on it that he generously credited in his discussion of the final episode.)
Suit looks great in motion, even if you can’t tell right away since he’s soundly immobile. Sincerely, Corenswet does a great job of being believably laid the fuck out. On the subject of his chops:
![“The thing that connects him so much in some ways to Christopher Reeve is he has a lot of deep training,” reveals Gunn. “I’ve never worked with such a rigorous actor. He challenged me on a daily basis to really get the most out this character and this story. Everything he does in the movie is utterly true. We don’t ever have a moment when we’ve been watching dailies where we go, ‘David did something that feels stupid—that doesn’t feel real.’ Never. He’s always completely present.” “James suggested [I read] All-Star Superman, which I did,” says Corenswet. “I drew a lot from that specifically for Clark. I also loosely stole some stuff from my brother-in-law, who’s 6’ 8” and 270 pounds and has the deepest voice and is always in the way and always trying not to be.”](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/992c0b1a-d3e6-41e8-bbf0-0b98abb020e2.png?w=960&fit=max)
And further on that note from good friend and past Whowatch guest Elizabeth Edwards:
God it’s so good to have a goddamn Julliard alum in the role; it’d be so easy for DC movies to settle with, “Batman gets the really interesting behavioral performance, Superman just needs the right jaw,” and instead we’ve got a guy who everyone insists is the most rigorous actor working in superhero movies today
(To be clear: Julliard is a batshit insane institution that pits its students against each other needlessly, but — the people who graduate are damn good at acting!)
We saw some of his performance as Clark already in set videos, but yeah, it’s that guy. Brosnahan hitting him with a “I know you’re secretly Superman…AND I’M INTO IT” glance, and Corenswet retaliating with a maximum power guileless Clark Kent derpface.
The couple seconds with Pa Kent are telling; though he seemingly has slicked-back hair as Superman and more ‘natural’ hair as Clark - usually an annoyance of mine, though at least he’s got the spitcurl right to make a little S rather than the backwards thing actors end up with sometimes that Chris Sims once aptly named 2-Man - his look in Smallville reveals his Daily Planet ‘do is deliberately more dorky and puffed-up than how it really lands. It’s a nice visual shorthand for the ‘it’s the alien who knows how to drive a tractor who’s the real guy, not either of the performances he puts on for Metropolis’ idea that Gunn’s talked about going with.
My favorite moment in the whole trailer, even over what it immediately precedes, is the super-whistle. Most mass-media Supermen would’ve either lay there and wait to die until hologram Jor-El showed up to save him since he was close enough to the Fortress, or reminisced over how much he loves humanity until that gave him the strength to get back up. This guy comes up with a clever trick. For all the tchotchkes this throws at us, and by all means continue to do so, that felt like what Superman, from comics, would do in that situation.
dog. dog good.
Looks like he’s sliding into home plate to save that kid, real Morrison/Morales Action Comics energy on that shot.
Speaking of the visuals - I’m just pleased this seems to be landing on ‘pleasing maximalism’ rather than ‘terrible’ - Elizabeth again, who’d been initially horrified at Henry Braham’s announcement as cinematographer:
Also thank god the visuals look solidly Good
This might be jumping the gun based on just one trailer, but it looks like the movie’s going to heavily benefit from staying in the 1.90 IMAX-expanded ratio instead of cutting between those moments and cropped, spherical 2.39; Gunn will never be a Snyder-style visual stylist, CinemaScope doesn’t really play to his strengths, so he can just focus on the colors and getting some nice sturdy square images
Who’s that between the two Luthorcorp towers? It looks like they’re either using a cane or pulling a lever.
Lex in a tux with a revolver doing a little mocking wince at someone, we’re in business.
PUNCH, but more importantly, in those other cages, are those…robots? Evil golems??
Okay so I would like the “Boravia” stuff to not be the worst shit in the entire world. I’m not even asking for ‘not the bad part’, just not ‘so bad it is correctly the main thing the movie ends up remembered for’. My one real critique but god what a doozy; I’m willing to roll with a certain amount of ‘right, this is a four-quadrant production, this is never going to be based leftist material’ ala The Batman having Carmine Falcone be defeated by the power of Not All Cops, and Gunn I guess seems more left-leaning than not so hopefully it won’t be anything too catastrophic? But this is absolutely the pressure point of the whole affair. Also newspaper headline suggesting Grodd might be involved?
Good pair of comments by Lavender Jack and Saint John creator Dan Schkade. Apparently people complained about Superman flinching? Shades of John Byrne once announcing he was dropping the Supergirl show because she blinked at headlights, but c’mon, of course Superman flinches at an ordinary person throwing something at him, it makes him sad.
What kind of depraved freaks are out there saying he is anything but perfect and beautiful.
LOVE that the monster is a big dopey cartoon Godzilla because that’s the kind of monster Superman fights. Some people are hoping this is giant turtle Olsen, I don’t know if I believe but I sure want to.
Oh ok that wasn’t just a poster ‘day in the life’ kind of problem, the big tendrily orb-monster is a real part of the movie. Guess it probably isn’t Solaris :(, but I’ve seen people suggest Sun-Eater?
Rachel Brosnahan and David Corenswet are very attractive people.
![“They're close, they have been close, at least [at] that moment. But what I love about their relationship, through every iteration of the comic books and all the films and television series is that they're soulmates. They're united in the fact that they are both in relentless pursuit of truth and justice, but they approach the world in totally different ways. She's somebody who, because of her profession, but also because of who she is, she questions everything, she questions everyone, she's trying to see around every corner, and that's the way that she faces the world.](https://assets.buttondown.email/images/51203fe0-569f-4bbb-8232-cacc0d0ea680.png?w=960&fit=max)
"It’s fun to watch them kind of bump up against each other sometimes in more ways than one." ma’am. ma’am.
People have been speculating that’s Kelex but no friends, that is Robot 7, who must atone. He’s even got the little blue cape the robots did in All-Star! Gunn wasn’t fooling in all those interviews about going for a truly different sci-fi world aesthetically, between this, the Luthorcorp tower (some folks are annoyed it’s Luthorcorp rather than Lexcorp, but perhaps surprisingly, I don’t care), and the art deco vibes seen elsewhere.
I didn’t realize that was Rexy-boy at first but truly, between this and the new Ewing/Lieber book, when since the 1960s have Metamaniacs feasted like this?
Luthor coping, seething, and if he still had the capacity malding like never before, a single delicate tear rolling down his check, presumably over how much he wants to kill Superman. SEETHING directly into the camera as if to respond to the chanting “I HATE you, children of the world who believe in Superman! I’ll get him one day, you’ll see!!!”
Superman pushing the building back up like in Fleischer! Wonder if it has to do with the dominoing buildings earlier.
Yup, that sure is Mister Terrific, that guy from comics, in real life, apparently fighting some of Lex’s goons.
Speaking as one of the converted when it comes to the Snyder trilogy, as longtime readers well know: “And at the end we’re going to drop the title MAN OF STEEL, so people know this is a slick, weighty modern thing like THE DARK KNIGHT was” does not have 1/50th the aura of not putting the title in the trailer here because you KNOW what the title of the movie is, everyone in the world spends the entire trailer SCREAMING at you what the title is.
So yes I was exactly as normal as you’d imagine, though less ‘weepy sentimentality’ than ‘shivering, vaguely insensate, to an untrained observer this would appear to be some kind of alarming neurological episode’. I think this really makes a case for itself for pretty much anyone baseline willing to be sold on the idea of a Superman movie, and as a work unto itself, I think it’s a really tidy POV-driven ‘narrative’: you start with Superman beaten in the snow, cutting between that and him doing Clark stuff to establish he's reminiscing as the framework for this, with his rattly breathing sticking across multiple clips emphasizing that you’re in his head. We see him not meeting Lois halfway, exactly the kind of regret you might reflect on when you've been through a supervillainous meatgrinder and you're dying a stone's throw from your secret lair, before reflecting back further on his relationship with his Pa. Then once Krypto grabs him, you start going through the series of threats arrayed against him - the monster, Luthor, the cells, the public, the JLI, clear ‘how we got here’ stuff - and then as the cheering ramps up (again across multiple scenes, so you're already unconsciously primed to think of it as what he's hearing) Krypto starts to gain speed, and you see him flying above the flames, having some kind of serious real conversations with Lois, breaking down over the death of the Superman robot, pushing the building back up, and fighting back against Luthor’s soldier, concluding not on an epic moment but hugging Lois at the end of the world. Without giving away much of anything about the plot, we have an understanding of where the movie is going to be taking us emotionally.
Filmmaking!™
Sean asks: In Action Comics #243, Superman quite famously had his head turn into that of a lion. Among the many romantic interests of Supergirl, the most famous of them is Comet the Superhorse, who frequently shifted back and forth between being a man and a horse. And, of course, Jimmy Olsen turned into a giant turtle boy. What I'm getting at is this: Are Superman comics better when written with fetish fuel in mind?
yes
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And finally, the post about The Nice House on the Lake I’ve been promising forever is outlined, so that’ll be soon.