The new Superman movie has two post-credits sequences. The first shows Superman and Krypto sitting on the moon looking down at Earth. The second is a goof between Superman and Mister Terrific about trying to patch up Metropolis after the third-act catastrophe. There are no surprising reveals. No teases for new characters and future movies. I thought for sure that Darkseid’s eyes were going to light up from the other side of a pocket universe portal or something. Instead, there was nothing. It’s such a relief.
After decades of Marvel erecting an ever broader and more convoluted web of movie and TV show tie-ins, each drawing from vast comic book reserves not just to create and tell stories that are entertaining in and of themselves, but to reliably fuel box-office revenues year in and year out, it is nice to sit down to a comic book movie that is unabashedly in love with its source material and willing to deploy it without obvious ulterior motives. Superman is bursting with DC references and deep cuts, but in a way that feels like you stumbled upon them by rummaging through your friend’s old toy bins rather than watching them get made on the assembly line at the factory.
For example, there is the “Justice Gang” consisting of Guy Gardner/Green Lantern, Kendra Saunders/Hawkgirl, and Michael Holt/Mister Terrific. Their powerful-but-bumbling-but-ultimately-goodhearted shtick is a familiar trope in Gunn’s movies. They are essentially Diet Pepsi Guardians of the Galaxy, but nothing in Superman wastes time trying to lay the groundwork for a potential spin-off. They serve clear roles within the plot, have their own little micro-character arcs within the movie, but are mostly kept out of the way. The one exception is Mister Terrific who eventually becomes one of the anchors of the movie. Even then, nothing in Superman seeds the threat of a spin-off.
At no point do you feel like actor Edi Gathegi is “trying out” for a standalone movie, even though he aces every line, including some really terrible ones, and has the best single action sequence in Superman. It feels like how support characters were always used in the DC animated series, the only successful semblance of a DCU that Warner Bros. ever managed. The Batman, Superman, and Justice League animated series episodes were a tight 22 minutes each, designed to appear on TV out of order on any given afternoon or Saturday morning. The stories were never constructed as launching boards for new reoccurring characters in hopes of launching, for example, a separate Aquaman cartoon. They instead encouraged you to revel in whoever did show up because you might not ever see them again except as part of the background scenery.
Superman isn’t completely free of the superhero marketing industrial complex which shows like The Boys have successfully mocked for years. There’s a Peacemaker cameo, though it’s brief and simply played for laughs. And we do see Supergirl show up at some point after partying off-planet. Even that tease for the upcoming 2026 movie is tastefully limited and doesn’t sabotage the actual story everyone’s actually showing up to see. It does explain Krypto’s role in Superman, putting a neat, easily ignored bow on what is otherwise the most endearing part of the movie. What the movie doesn’t saddle us with are any throwaway scenes where characters we don’t know or care about mumble things like “Daggett Industries” to help “lay the groundwork” for a Clayface movie. That movie, coming next year, will have to rely on its own merits rather than riding the coattails of a greater DCU to achieve above-average box office success.
“I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies,” Gunn told Rolling Stone last month. “It’s not because of home screens getting so good. The number-one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay.” You can tell the difference in Superman, a movie not labored by rewrites, reshoots, and backbench Marvel talent shuffling. It exists because watching a kind-hearted person protect people from monsters and corporate megalomaniacs is fun and cool and entertaining to watch. Not because it can Moneyball another half-dozen billion-dollar comic book franchises into existence.
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