Superman is a Blue Lantern

Not counting the Deadpool movies1, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the only MCU movie I have not seen. Funny enough, what keeps me away isn’t Guardians Vol 2 (though it’s certainly a factor), but rather The Suicide Squad. The common thread of these is James Gunn, the creative visionary (or “twisted mind” if you remember the trailers to The Suicide Squad) DC has selected to take creative control of implementing their latest attempt at a shared universe cinematic universe. His next major effort is Superman, another attempt to get audiences to care about a nigh-invulnerable alien from another planet whose biggest weakness is a chunk of rare, green-glowing rock.

The pressure is high. DC has a lot riding on yet another attempt of getting audiences on board with a series of big-budget blockbusters stemming from a shared universe. They want a money-printing machine on the level of Marvel Studios’ MCU. They thought they had something in 2013 when they released Man of Steel from director Zack Snyder, but maybe this time it’ll work with Gunn as the lead on creative and Peter Safran as his co-chairman/co-CEO handling the more businessy aspects of running a studio.

This new initiative (branded DC Films) is already on the move. The Gunn-penned animated series Creature Commandos launched a seven episode first season late last year (a second is on the way), and a second season of Peacemaker is coming in August, with Gunn writing all eight episodes of that as well (and directing at least the season premiere).

Superman, though, is the big launchpad. Like the DCEU before it, they. believe Superman is the right vehicle from which to launch this endeavor, though Zack Snyder and James Gunn are very different creative forces. At the end of the day, Snyder is more of a director. He’s certainly written his own scripts, but looking at his projects, he’s way more comfortable behind the camera than holding the pen. Gunn has a writing background, having had tremendous success as a screenwriter before his big breakout with 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy. That different skillset might just prove the thing that makes it work this time. Maybe. No promises.

A brief history of DC’s cinematic efforts

There are four distinct eras that cover DC’s superheroes2. They are…

The Christopher Reeve Era

• Superman: The Movie (1978)
• Superman II (1980)
• Superman III (1983)
• Supergirl (1984)
• Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)
• Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (2006)

This effort was mostly led by Ilya and Alexander Salkind, producers who purchased the rights to make Superman films and wanted a campy film a la the Adam West Batman series of the late 60s. They hired Mario “The Godfather” Puzo to write the script, but it was Richard Donner who ended up directing the first movie, re-working it from the ground up as a mythic origin story with an epic scope. The result? Superman: The Movie, is a terrific, wonderful superhero film that really is one of the best of its kind, a movie most superhero films are still chasing.

The other films of this era are all (at best) middling for many, many reasons. Richard Lester is a comedy director who traffics in cynicism, making Superman II & III feel small and petty. Supergirl is really not good. Superman IV: The Quest For Peace is one of maybe five movies in my life where “I wish I hadn’t”. And the Richard Donner Cut of Superman II is fabulous for what it is: as a tease of what we might have had, but hampered by being cobbled together from an aborted process, eternally, irrevocably unfinished.

The era does, however, prove that superhero films can work.

The 90s Batman Era

• Batman (1989)
• Batman Returns (1992)
• Batman Forever (1995)
• Batman & Robin (1997)
• Steel (1997)
• Catwoman (2004)

It’s not fair to loop Catwoman in that list, but… it kinda goes there. Sorry, haters.

The 90s were an explosion of Batmania. A lot of people would like to carve out the two Burton movies (Batman and Returns) from the Schumachers (Forever and & Robin), but they all more or less come from the same place. Schumacher is just less Gothic about it. It’s easy to forget that the Adam West Batman series of the 1960s was a smash hit, a raging success beyond what you might even imagine. As such, Adam West defined Batman at least somewhat couched in the camp & silly, and the character wasn’t able to fully shake off that ethos until 2008. All four 90s Batman films are firmly in that tone despite people like Michael Uslan treating Burton’s film as some self-serious success that finally meant people wouldn’t laugh at his favorite special boy.

No shade on any of these movies. They’re all basically underrated and fun, fitting into their specific niche incredibly well, but the problem is there was nowhere for this era to go beyond Batman. Look at Steel, a great example of “what was DC thinking?” It’s a naked cash grab that doesn’t have much thought beyond “Shaquille O'Neal already has a Superman ‘S’ tattoo so why don’t we put him in a suit with that on its chest.” I mostly bring it up here because it makes me laugh.

The Christopher Nolan Era

• Batman Begins (2005)
• Superman Returns (2006)
• The Dark Knight (2008)
• Green Lantern (2011)
• The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

The only thing to really say about the Christopher Nolan era is how well it didn’t play with others. The Nolan films are incredible achievements in superhero filmmaking, but DC fell into the same trap as the 90s: Batman plays well on his own and inserting him into a world of Gods, Monsters, and Magic needs to be part of the initial design. By basing their work on Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s Batman: Year One, a series known for being gritty and street-level, there’s not really an opportunity to port in a larger DC universe.

Superman Returns is a weird, underrated film that’s mostly unwatchable now because of director Bryan Singer and star Kevin Spacey (whom Singer cast as Lex Luthor). It has a lot of haters and is overly deferential to Donner’s original Superman film, but there are sequences that are some of the best Superman ever committed to film. People say it’s bad because “Superman doesn’t throw a punch”, but pardon me for not using Superman’s punchiness as a barometer of a film’s quality. That film’s strength is in the sense of alienation and loneliness, a solid theme to explore when it comes to a dude who is physically invulnerable. There’s a brief mention of Gotham City, but it was very clear upon release that this was not connected really at all to Nolan’s films despite pre-release intimations that it might be.

And Green Lantern? … I mean it’s the closest thing to this point where DC said “we’re gonna make a big epic superhero universe”, but it’s a wild failure of a movie and falls prey to DC’s key vulnerability. The whole movie has big “let’s take a quasi-known character and spin him into something that will get people excited”, an unsubtle attempt to replicate the success of Iron Man.

But here’s the big problem that hasn’t really mattered to this point. Unlike Marvel, DC has been part of a corporate conglomerate since the late 1960s. Any DC film or TV series has to go through Warner Bros. Marvel was mostly autonomous until Disney acquired them in 2009, and by that time they’d established a system that let them be autonomous and Kevin Feige be emperor of his little fief. Marvel had a freedom to make movies the way they wanted and were free from accountability to the higher-ups (relatively speaking, of course).

Green Lantern is a major casualty of the Warner Bros. dynamic, clearly heavily-noted by suits and hamstrung by setting up the exciting Green Lantern mythos Geoff Johns had introduced over the previous decade. The suits in charge are not the ones who understand the potential of what they’re making. Their job is to make money, and their decisions are maximizing that potential, not servicing the esoteric whims of some creative. Great movies need great creatives who receive guidance on improvements, not demands from on executives who don’t comprehend.

Tl;dr - When the credits rolled on Dark Knight Rises, DC was at a narrative dead end and needed to do something new. There was no path forward from there.

The DCEU

• Man of Steel (2013)
• Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
• Suicide Squad (2016)
• Wonder Woman (2017)
• Justice League (2017)
• Aquaman (2018)
• Shazam! (2019)
• Birds of Prey (2020)
• Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)
• The Suicide Squad (2021)
• Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)
• Black Adam (2022)
• Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)
• The Flash (2023)
• Blue Beetle (2023)
• Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)

When laid out like that, it’s stunning to see just how big an effort DC put into making DC movies happen. Wow.

So first things first, I’ve been very open about my feelings that Man of Steel is salted earth from the moment the credits say “Directed by Zack Snyder”. They might have launched the DCEU on the backs of finding interesting directors to tell unique tales using DC’s superheroes, and they might have wanted all these heroes to come together in Justice League, but Snyder is a deeply cynical individual. Man of Steel is two straight hours of watching the film birth the DCEU while simultaneously stabbing it in the side, every blow a mortal one. It’s insane that with the remit of “make a Superman movie that can spawn other heroes”, Snyder and Goyer wrote a film that actively eviscerates the possibility of that ever happening.

For more on this, look no further than the best sequence in Justice League, when the team works together to resurrect Superman, only for him to awaken as a silent lunatic who threatens to murder all of them. Superman’s power set is terrifying in the hands of anyone not good enough to wield it responsibly, and in that moment we can’t trust him. Snyder’s vision of Superman is one who should scare people, hardly the vision of inspiration he is at his best. It is, in a lot of ways, extremely anti-fascist. Personally, while I think fascists are horrible and should go fuck themselves, Snyder’s vision runs counter to the spirit of Superman himself.

But even the other attempts are slapdash, and by the beginning of 2020 the entire enterprise had functionally collapsed. Wonder Woman is fairly solid and Aquaman has its defenders, but Wonder Woman 1984 is a trainwreck while Suicide Squad is a top-to-bottom disaster3. This is to say nothing of The Flash (a total shitshow with almost no redeeming qualities4; why they pinned the entire survival of the DCEU on that is beyond me) as the final death knell, one whose back half swings fully into the salted earth of Man of Steel as though to remind everyone of just how DOA this whole shared universe was. Justice League might have a four-hour director’s cut that fixes some of the movie’s inherent problems, but even that shows the limitations of Snyder’s vision. In its most perfectly flawless state, a director’s cut can only do so much to salvage a movie that would never have been good.

The story of the DCEU is one of slow decline, where every Zack Snyder-directed installment made me long for the imperfections of the previous films. By the time the final Aquaman film came out it was barely limping along, graciously put out of its misery by Gunn & Safran’s new tenure.

A New DC

The biggest problem DC has had in all of these is a lack of singular vision. At their most successful, DC thrives under strong-minded creatives who can battle their way through the corporate bureaucracy that might diminish what is possible. It’s why Donner, Burton, Nolan, and even Snyder were so successful (at least initially). For all my distaste for the DCEU, it’s undeniable that once Snyder walked away the whole thing disintegrated quickly. The biggest problem with the onslaught of shared universes is that they don’t exactly align with the traditional role of movie studios. Warner Bros. has been around for a hundred years. With a century of institutional memory, their execs thrive in making movies, not universes. It’s unreasonable to expect them to understand the fully guiding hand these universes need as they build out, sprawling out as they do across disparate casts and storylines. Universal can run Fast & the Furious movies, but outside of the one spinoff, they’re all on one continuous thread. Big shared universes with many moving parts are not even the same league: they’re an entirely different sport.

(Honestly, every time we bump up against it, it strikes me just how miraculous and unique the MCU is for exactly this reason. It’s a movie studio, but its secret weapon is their head creative force. Kevin Feige is a gifted producer who can speak and understand this storytelling language. He’s not some suit who reports to a board of shareholders, which is where almost all of these other initiatives collapse. )

Enter James Gunn.

Given his success in the MCU, Gunn moving to DC makes a ton of sense. There’s more freedom than in the MCU (or, at least, a blanker canvas) and building from the ground up means Gunn can be the one who determines what these movies look like. He also seems to be a fast writer, having written the entire season of Creature Commandos in a matter of weeks5 and writing/showrunning an entire season of Peacemaker while being the CEO of DC Films and writing/directing a whole Superman film.

What’s undeniable is that Gunn has a vision and a tone that he can absolutely capture and convey. It’s no accident he went and made The Suicide Squad when DC scooped him up after Marvel fired him (unjustly, tbh) and then (after getting the new job at DC) gravitated to the Creature Commandos as his first official project. He has a predilection for the strange and an affinity for outcasts and weirdos. It’s refreshing, really, seeing someone unafraid to do deep cuts into DC’s character rosters to find interesting possibilities around whom they can build stories.

Just like in 2013, Gunn chose Superman as the vehicle from which he can launch this new iteration of DC. It’s the right choice. It’s easy for Batman to arrive in his own little hermetically-sealed corner (see Matt Reeves’s The Batman), whereas the mere existence of Superman allows for more possibility w/r/t aliens, magic, metahumans, and powers.

Also? The world needs Superman. More than it needs The Flash or Green Lantern, anyway.

On paper, this should be a rousing success. I am a massive fan of Superman, and have made a point of supporting just about everything he’s been in. For all the complaints of him being some boring boy scout, there’s a vast untapped ocean of great stories for cinema to explore. It’s been over half a century, but no Superman outing has topped Donner’s film. While I love that film, I would love it more for it to finally be time for something to come out and be better.

So… why am I so apprehensive?

Your mileage may vary

Guardians of the Galaxy was a miracle. I remember exactly where I was when I heard Marvel was making it and god I can’t tell you how hard my jaw-dropped. It was July 2012. The Avengers had just come out and Marvel Studios was ascendant. They had just announced the next Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a film based on Ed Brubaker & Sean Epting’s run on the Steve Rogers and his relationship with the newly resurrected Bucky Barnes (spoilers, I guess?). I remember just prior to that encouraging anyone who wanted to get into comics to read that run. This was when I was deep into my comic reading, and I was also a big fan of The Guardians of the Galaxy by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, an spinoff of their other work in the Cosmic sphere of the Marvel Universe, a run which had started in the wake of the Annihilation event and had continued in their run on Nova.

But there was no way (no way!) that this squad of a gun-wielding raccoon, a giant tree who can only say one declarative phrase, multiple green aliens, and a psychic K-9 cosmonaut would ever make it to the big screen. Impossible.

Upon its release in 2014, Marvel established what would become functional invulnerability for the rest of the decade. Not only did that movie actually come out (though the psychic K-9 cosmonaut was relegated to a brief cameo/Easter egg), but it was freaking great and audiences loved it. Guardians dominated the 2014 box office, landing at #1 domestically and #3 worldwide. Marvel Studios has had a number of feathers in their cap, but Guardians is certainly one of their four greatest success stories6.

We credit a lot of that success to James Gunn, though I’m inclined to withhold more than most (despite his claims that he’s the genius reason it happened). He is quick to sweep his co-screenwriter Nicole Perlman under the rug. When she first got a job at the Marvel screenwriting program (a factory where Marvel hired a bunch of screenwriters to develop scripts for possibly MCU films) Perlman pulled the Abnett & Lanning comics off the shelf and adapted them into a screenplay good enough that Marvel put the movie into active development. James Gunn is quick to say (as Joss Whedon did with Zak Penn’s co-story credit on The Avengers) that Perlman got too much credit for her work on the film. Credit arbitration controversies aside, Perlman shares a “Written by” credit with Gunn, a far more significant acknowledgement of her contribution than Penn’s (who got a co-credit on the story and none of the screenplay). Armed with this information, I’m inclined to believe that she had far more of a hand in the final product than others (like Gunn) would like you to believe.

I also say this because I’m not a fan of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. As Guardians 2 regularly appears towards the top of just about every person’s MCU ranking, this puts me in the minority. It’s a movie I’ve seen multiple times, but for all my love of the first film (I have it ranked at #6 overall), the sequel ranks dead last in my personal ranking of the MCU. Maybe it’s my distaste of films for the film’s themes or that the second Awesome Mix is inferior to the first (and I’ll add that “The Chain” is maybe my favorite song of all time)… but between Guardians 2 and The Suicide Squad, there are two things that I keep coming back to.

The first is that I’m not a huge fan of the film’s overall story. It’s messy and far less elegant than the first. James Gunn can talk about how shy he was doing mocap for the Baby Groot dancing stinger in the original Guardians’ mid-credits scene, but that didn’t stop him from making that dance the full front-and-center focus of Volume 2’s opening credits sequence. The seven post-credits scenes feel like they come from a dude who couldn’t make up his mind on how best to conclude the story.

But these are nitpicks. My biggest issue is the ham-handed exploration of the familial themes inherent in the Guardians’ basic found-family premise. The first film’s focus is on Peter Quill’s relationship with his mother and the lingering guilt of his inability to deal with her death. As such, it makes sense for Volume 2 to pivot to Quill’s father. Really, though, there’s no comparison. The dying mother plot is one the first film’s script handles with wonderful nuance and delicacy, a far cry from a movie that literally has Peter and his dad Ego The Living Planet play a nice sweet game of catch. I’ll also cop to my own weariness of stories about fathers and sons. These are stories we’ve so thoroughly explored at this point that I don’t know what any such film brings to the table that’s new and interesting. It’s also clear that James Gunn likes Michael Rooker’s Yondu far more than I do (I like Michael Rooker, I just felt so weary by the character’s obvious demise that it didn’t affect me).

To me, the emotional success in Guardians is far greater in the film that Gunn took over from Perlman than the one that came wholly from him. Without having to follow what she established, there’s a clear difference.

The second is something that’s a bit larger and perhaps more to my particular taste. It’s no secret that Gunn has a very black comedy view of violence, not so different from, say Quentin Tarantino. Look no farther than Slither or Super to see his treatment of violence as funny and macabre. This aesthetic is somewhat in Guardians 2, but front-and-center in The Suicide Squad, a movie that’s practically gleeful in its sadistic depictions of viscera and glorification of gore.

Guardians 2 is more violent than OG Guardians, but it’s also a far nastier film. The sequence where the the Ravagers torment and bully Baby Groot is deeply upsetting. Yes, it’s supposed to be. But the reason that scene exists is not just because Gunn wants us to watch Baby Groot to suffer (though that seems the point), it’s to get us to hate all these bastards so completely that when Yondu whistles his arrow through all of their skulls as he mass slaughters that entire cadre, we can all celebrate and cheer at the demise of these evil, malicious douchebags. To apply a moniker of a different situation to this one: with Gunn, it feels like the cruelty is the point.

This cruelty extends to The Suicide Squad, a movie that is beyond over-the-top with its depictions of violence. I usually have a strong stomach with this, but I do draw the line at sadism. I can acknowledge Gunn made the movie he wanted to make and did that aspect of it well, it just wasn’t to my taste. And… well… that violence was enough that I never saw Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3. Even the people who loved Guardians 2 said it was a difficult movie to stomach given its depictions of animal experimentation and torture. Forgive me for not feeling like I have the fortitude to watch James Gunn portray grisly violence on screen, even if cute animals on screen are wholly digital creations.

The third (and most damning) issue is that The Suicide Squad is a boring, boring movie. I find Guardians 2 dull, but at least it made me feel something. The Suicide Squad’s 132 minute run time left me bored out of my skull with no moments that piqued my interest, engagement, or feelings. And it feels like a movie with limited compromise and oversight on the part of DC. They let James Gunn take the wheel and make exactly the movie he wanted to make, so desperate they were to have a Guardians-level hit on their hands. Tons of characters, a great cast, buckets of R-rated violence, nonstop jokes, and a big ass Starro.

It being boring, though? It’s one thing to make a movie that sparks rage, but rage, ire, anger, hatred… those are just variations of passion and love. Any film that inspires apathy, boredom, and malaise is committing the cardinal sin of narrative storytelling. Literally anything else is preferable.

And it’s not like I was entirely unreasonable about seeing Guardians 3. I laid out what it would take: if there was someone who loved Guardians 1, but hated Guardians 2 AND hated Gunn’s Suicide Squad AND YET despite that saw/loved Guardians 3, maybe I would go see it. Only one person fit this criteria, and given the response from everyone else, it simply wasn’t enough. Sure, people might call it “the best Marvel film since Avengers: Endgame”, but given the quality output from Marvel since the pandemic, that’s hardly the ringing endorsement people seem to think it is.

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 is still the only MCU film I haven’t seen. Not sure I ever will. There are currently no plans for that to change.

So it was with a heavy heart that I acknowledged Gunn’s installation as the head of DC. Post-Guardians 3, I’d basically sworn off the guy, happy for everyone else, but disappointed that it would be a long time before we’d get the non-Batman DC superheroes I truly wanted to see in a context that captured what I love about them. When they announced that they’d be launching with Superman I was even more disheartened, more so when they announced Gunn would be writing the screenplay. I even laughed when Gunn said they didn’t know who would direct it and that they weren’t worried about that yet. Only the script was what mattered. Sure, Jan.

Honestly, Gunn hiring himself as director of Superman felt like when Dick Cheney announced that after an exhaustive search that he was the best choice to be George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000, or when Mike Richards decided that as the executive producer/showrunner of Jeopardy! he would be the best choice to replace Alex Trebek as the show’s host following Trebek’s death.

If there’s cynicism bleeding through here, it’s because I simply can’t help it. Everything since Guardians 2 has so clouded my vision that it’s hard for me to see Gunn without those tainting layers obscuring the view.

… and then the trailer dropped.

Can I believe a man will fly?

In 2014 a friend of mine talked about how he believed screenwriter Chris Terrio joining the creative team gave him hope for Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice. I specifically remember telling him Goyer’s script was not the problem with Man of Steel or the DCEU moving forward, Zack Snyder as director was. And Zack Snyder was still there directing the sequel. In the end I congratulated myself on not taking the bait…

And here, I’ve got the Chris Terrio moment of my own but… more. Everything announced with Gunn’s Superman excites me. These include…

• Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane7

• Krypto!

• Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor

• Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific

• Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho

• A Superdog wearing a cape!

• Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner

• Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl

• Wendell Pierce as Perry White

• Milly Alcock as Supergirl

• Krypto!

But at the center of it all is James Gunn. And this isn’t some Zack Snyder situation where Snyder is directing the scripts from David Goyer or Chris Terrio. Gunn wrote this movie. He directed this movie. He is the CEO and co-chairman of the studio making the film. It’s going to be his movie. That gives me tremendous pause. Even that first promo image of Superman taking the time to pull on his boots as the weird giant alien zaps a big death ray towards Metropolis feels like the sort of wry cynicism that makes the Richard Lester Superman films so awful. Look at Superman! He’s pullin’ on his boots to go to work! He’s in no rush! People are dying but he’s gotta tie his shoes! Isn’t that silly?

And yet… that trailer.

Here’s the thing. I am not the audience for this trailer. This is a trailer that is targeted squarely at the audience who thinks Superman is lame and boring and a boy scout. My first reaction to seeing Superman beaten and brutalized, broken on the ground in the snow, spitting blood was “oh great. Here we go. James Gunn already on his ‘let’s watch people suffer’ kick.” But in retrospect, it’s clear that what Gunn is doing here is not that. … well okay maybe there’s a little bit of that, but really, what he’s trying to show the audience is that his Superman is one whose enemies can hurt him. His Superman is vulnerable. His Superman can bleed. His Superman will call for help if he needs it and when that help arrives in the form of his dopey little snow-white dog in a ridiculous cape, he’ll humbly offer his own cape so the dog can tow him home. His Superman will punch things and break glass and fly and make sure to protect the heads/medulla oblongata of those he saves. His Superman will inspire children to Iwo Jima improvised Superman flags into the air and then raise their eyes to the sky and whisper for him to help them because he is, as ever, needed.

Everything in this trailer looks fabulous.

When it comes to James Gunn, I have a friend who feels similar to me. He was one of the first people I texted after I watched to check in and see if I was being foolishly sucked into this because it’s giving me what I want. His reaction was that the movie felt overstuffed. And… sure. Do we need Mr. Terrific AND Hawkgirl AND Guy Gardner? AND Metamorpho? AND a Lex Luthor plot? AND Krypto? AND Supergirl?

… Maybe not. But I am not above wanting to see all of those things on screen. Honestly, the insertion of Mr. Terrific alone is the sort of fan service from which I cannot help myself lizard-braining.

Beyond that………? God. It’s just so bright. So colorful. The reds are red! They’ve finally decided that the trunks don’t look stupid and that he looks worse when their absence accentuates the leotard of his suit (accurate). The trailer doesn’t have the same tone as The Suicide Squad or Guardians because Gunn (I assume) knows that Superman is a different beast entirely. This Superman saves people and fights giant monsters. This Clark Kent awkwardly ducks and weaves through crowds and sits with hunched shoulders. This movie has good smooching with Lois Lane and an emotional moment with Pa Kent. There’s tenderness and passion, far from the stiff alienation of Superman Returns or the cold, macho, empathy-free environment of Man of Steel.

And Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner has a truly atrocious, gloriously accurate bowl cut.

It looks romantic, powerful, and.. and it looks wonderful. Despite myself (and because Blank Check decided that they’re going to cover it for the show) I will be going opening weekend, with minimum reservations.

There is a joke oft repeated when it comes to Superman. Be it Kryptonian translation or simply the beacon of his presence, the S stands for hope. Despite every single misgiving and the rational part of my braining telling me this isn’t going to end well, that I’m going to get my heart broken, that it’ll be just as bad (but different) as walking out of Man of Steel 12 years ago, that hope is a fire within me. I so badly want a good Superman movie. I believe that this truly might be. If it isn’t, then I go back into the retirement hibernation for I’ve been in since Man of Steel. I’ve been here before. I’ll get back to banking on the margins like a Supergirl movie based on a Tom King (probably my favorite superhero comics writer of the last decade) comic and a Lanterns series from Tom King and Damon Lindelof (my favorite screenwriter working today).

But for now, for the next few months? … god dammit. I actually do believe.

How about you?