New 'Superman' Trailer Hopes To Inspire Audiences To Look Up ...

You will believe DC Studios can fly, if co-CEO James Gunn has anything to say about it. Writer-director Gunn’s first new Superman trailer takes flight Thursday morning, with hopes of inspiring audiences to once more look up to DC’s iconic superhero.

David Corenswet stars in "Superman."

Source: Warner

Interest is rising — among fans, Hollywood, and entertainment press, if not yet among the public at large — in Gunn’s rebooted Superman, but will it be enough?

While I have every confidence in Gunn’s filmmaking abilities and his eye for what makes these characters popular and click with a broad mainstream audience, I don’t have equal confidence in audiences’ appetite for more DC movies after only two years since the final DC film in a decade-long and failed DCEU.

There are advantages and disadvantages on the road to DC’s box office redemption, each with potential to have its own impact on Superman’s box office future, and thus the future of DC Studios.

DCEU Superman Barely Got Off The Ground

When it started, the Man of Steel movie was meant to launch a new Superman franchise capable of maintaining DC’s box office position in the aftermath of Christopher Nolan’s massively successful The Dark Knight franchise.

Having lifted Batman to billion dollar box office, Nolan and fellow Dark Knight franchise alum David Goyer set their sights on making Man of Steel a similarly “grounded in faux-realism” approach to DC superheroes, with hopes of delivering equally blockbuster results. Crucially, however, Nolan envisioned this as a standalone series that wouldn’t really share a world with a cast of other superheroes.

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Production wasn’t even finished, however, when executives at Warner changed their minds and decided they couldn’t pass up the type of money Marvel Studios just minted with 2012’s $1.5 billion hit The Avengers. Plans shifted quickly toward using Man of Steel to launch a DC shared cinematic world, probably contributing to Nolan’s fast-fading interest in continuing as “grandfather” over the new series.

After Man of Steel’s $670 million box office run in 2013 — $970 million in inflation-adjusted dollars, but still a couple of hundred million below studio expectations — Warner, who’d presumed they would skip ahead of “laying the foundation” straight to $1 billion by riding Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy name-dropping, accelerated plans to produce a Justice League film and get Batman into the mix, while Superman lost status as the focus of studio plans and attention.

Man of Steel was followed by Batman v Superman, with Superman getting second billing in the title and being killed off at the end of a story in which the world turns against him and Batman kick his butt. Just as he’d arrived in our midst, the controversial Henry Cavill Superman was gone.

But the story around that was much deeper, more complicated, and longer than studio leadership wanted to release. So filmmaker Zack Snyder, who’d taken over as visionary leader of the DCEU, was forced to gut much of his film’s central motivations for Batman’s and Superman’s animosity toward one another, and removing most of Superman’s emotional and heroic arc in the process.

The theatrical cut of Batman v Superman suffered as a result, and its $874 million blockbuster box office was still much lower than the studio hoped and expected, and lower than the bottom level outcome (about $900 million or a bit higher) they would’ve accepted to allow Snyder’s plans to proceed (mostly) unmolested.

So having jettisoned the plans for a solo Superman series, they were now jettisoning another creative vision built around Superman, based once more on “execs know best” thinking. Superman, already pushed aside in the follow-up to his franchise launch, was further ostracized by a studio convinced nobody wanted more Superman.

I won’t rehash the whole dirty affair again, as I’ve covered it in such detail across so many articles over the years you can find the whole body of reports easier with a search engine than me trying to dive into it all again.

Suffice to say, Snyder’s and screenwriter Chris Terrio’s epic and ambitious vision for Superman, Batman, and Justice League built around Superman wound up stuck between competing priorities and studio demands, not to mention conflicting preferences and plans among the creative leadership overseeing the project

The heartbreaking loss of Zack and Deborah Snyder’s daughter Autumn in 2015, the resultant reworking of Justice League by Joss Whedon that turned the project into a Batman-centric story, and the film’s 2017 $661 million box office disappointment resulted in yet another re-thinking and further studio meddling to try to save a DCEU the same leadership had already failed at “fixing” last time.

Whatever else can be said, Cavill’s Superman felt grounded by WB and was never fully brought back on board after Man of Steel. This hurt the DCEU’s chances of endearing Superman to audiences, but it also makes it easier for audiences to move past the DCEU Superman, since his only screen appearance in the past seven years was a 2022 post-credit cameo scene in the little-seen Black Adam. Cavill’s last real big-screen appearance was 2017’s Justice League, and audience only saw him to any notable extent in the streaming release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League (which at least improved opinion of him and that movie).

Superman Suffers As Sony Sinks

Meanwhile, Sony was doing its part to simultaneously turn Spider-Man into a near-$2 billion live-action juggernaut and $1 billion animated franchise earning Oscar nominations, while also savaging the reputation and qualitative efforts of the genre with its struggling and mercifully shelved Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (or SSU).

Kraven the Hunter’s abominable $26 million global debut last weekend, with a mere $11 million domestic, provided a less than memorable end to the SSU as Sony was already promising to stay focused on the primary Spider-Man solo films in live-action and animation from now on (at least, for now — we’ll see how long that lasts).

So as I’ve argued before, while the DCEU did the vast majority of damage to DC’s reputation and brand, I suspect Sony’s consistent release of these SSU also-ran films, in their restrained failure to deliver on their premises, contributed to audiences growing wary of comic book films overall and hurt the genre’s reputation overall.

That this coincided so much with the Covid pandemic, particularly the DCEU losing its opportunity to regain some theatrical box office prestige after Aquaman’s post-Justice League billion dollar performance suggested audiences hadn’t quite given up fully on the DC shared universe yet.

Alas, the opportunity was not only squandered but was significantly hamstrung by the fact Wonder Woman 1984, The Suicide Squad, and even potentially Zack Snyder’s Justice League (which could’ve easily been split into two parts and released on Memorial Day and Christmas) weren’t able to get normal full theatrical releases that could’ve otherwise been hits, based off their franchise popularity, great marketing, and being actually great films.

And that meant any hope of the DCEU Superman getting any love was lost, despite potential and opportunities to restore the Man of Steel’s public image. Still, at least Cavill’s Superman got to appear in a completed DC universe and had his own limited arc fulfilled in general, with five film appearances if we count the two versions of Justice League separately (including an origin film, a Trinity film and “Death of Superman,” a Justice League team-up, and cameo in a movie with Justice Society).

The fact is, Marvel and its parent studio Disney are the only studios so far that seem to have learned the Covid era lessons sufficiently and understand how to apply them, earning blockbuster box office again with only relatively minor stumbles that never caused them to fall as badly or as long as others.

Marvel actually still put up moderate blockbuster numbers in 2020 and 2021, while most franchises and studios were non-starting or doing awful numbers. And by 2022 Marvel was back to general blockbuster levels again, then had its worst Convid-era year in 2023 with an underperformance by Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and huge success with James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, before The Marvels became the biggest flop of the MCU.

But we must recognize the reality of the context of the 2021-223 period, where the box office was littered with franchises and tentpoles and expensive would-be blockbusters crashing and burning in a theatrical industry free-fall. Except Marvel, which weathered the storm best and really only a had a few bumps in the road compared to most everyone else’s three-year crisis (which is going on a four-year crisis, to be clear).

Audiences didn’t get sick of superhero movies, they just got sick of the non-MCU superhero movies. So DC’s woes can’t be left on the doorstep of “superhero fatigue.” The public at large was no longer interested in showing up for DC superhero films, even when Batman is in them and even if it’s a Joker sequel movie. 2022’s The Batman was the last time audiences trusted DC enough to show up.

Superman’s New Boss, Same As The Old Boss?

The failure and end of the DCEU represented studio leadership’s lack of understanding of their own characters and brands, as well as a lack of understanding of or serious consideration of what their audiences wanted or why they wanted it.

Once Warner stopped really understanding what did or didn’t make their films popular, or why, it was impossible for them to fix it. So they couldn’t properly support projects that needed and deserved the help and attention most, nor cut loose projects and execs who were part of the problems in the first place.

Now, while Warner-Bros. Discovery has new leadership post-merger who’ve made plenty of controversial and questionable decisions — which I’ve been openly critical of here and elsewhere — one choice I agreed with and feel was an important step toward really fixing the studio’s DC problems was putting James Gunn and Peter Safran in charge and making DC Studios an independent studio.

But they still face widespread audience distrust of the DC brand on film. If Warner needed proof The Flash’s implications for the Batman brand weren’t an exception proving the rule, this October’s disastrous $206 million global gross for the eagerly awaited Joker: Folie à Deux sequel to 2019’s $1 billion Oscar-winner Joker. Whatever excuses or other qualifiers we can offer, the bottom line is once again a big-budget big-brand DC movie rejected by audiences, even on opening weekend.

When nobody’s showing up for a Joker sequel at this level, the studio has an emergency on their hands. Thank goodness The Penguin kept the popularity of Matt Reeves’ standalone The Batman universe on track, and helped boost enthusiasm for The Batman: Part II in 2026. But that’s two years away, and it says something that there’s probably currently more public awareness and expressed interest in the Reeves sequel than next summer’s Superman tentpole.

There’s also the question of whether WBD will honor the promise to let DC Studios proceed without interference — a promise already undermined by the fact casting for Superman had to be approved through a committee of studio execs including Warner President and CEO David Zaslav. If the studio couldn’t resist meddling and driving Nolan away from their DC properties, and after a decade of watching the DCEU decline, it’s hard to have faith Gunn and Safran will retain creative control and planning under the latest revolving-door leadership if Superman doesn’t hit the desired results.

Another factor is Creature Commandos, a good new animated series that launches the DCU with its first official property on the Max (formerly — and better-named — HBO Max). The show has particularly good action editing and animation, and appeals to fans like me who love this stuff in general, who love Gunn’s storytelling, and who appreciate animation for any kind of story and audience.

The problem is, so far there aren’t many signs Creature Commandos is getting the sort of larger viewership it needs, in order to send a clear signal that the DCU is off to a strong start. Part of that could be the adult R-rated content, which I’d argue is a questionable choice for the very first project to kick off a brand new DCU. And I’m going to get on my soapbox again to say adult fans need to get over the obsession with wanting R-rated superheroes all of the time.

Comics manage to tell these stories the vast majority of the time without needing R-rated levels of profanity, gore, nudity, and other things treated as “grown up” when it’s more akin to the preferences and behaviors of teenage fans who merely falsely associate such things and behaviors with “acting grown up.” I don’t need my comic book adaptations to over-compensate, I’m not embarrassed or ashamed of liking comic book material, nor do I feel it needs an R-rating to tell serious stories enjoyable by all ages of fans.

Yes, sometimes R-rated stories happen in comics and sometimes that’s the best approach. But there’s a growing drumbeat from fans and execs for more “adult”-oriented superhero content, and I feel it’s gotten way out of hand to the point it's becoming repetitive and derivative. Again, this stuff can be good or great, but it still also becomes exclusionary of other fans the more it leans into those things.

Creature Commandos could’ve easily been PG-13 and not missed a beat. Because if you’re launching a new DCU and trying to get everyone on board, I think getting fans of all ages matters on the front end. Because what I fear happening is mainstream viewers who rarely pay much attention to this stuff the way fans and press do, are going to see these efforts toward more of the “edgy” R-rated DC superheroes and think it’s more of the same thing we saw from the DCEU.

And it doesn’t help that so much of the DCEU’s final few years featured several characters of lower audience awareness or baked-in interest to launch a franchise, right when the DCEU was on a downward trajectory already. So a Creature Commandos show doesn’t do much to change that impression, however good it is and whatever other qualifiers I can keep adding to make my point without being rejected out of hand for not appreciating it regardless of whether it’s works from a business sense or not.

Which brings us back to The Penguin, which dominated streaming viewership for two months and ramped up interest in The Batman: Part II. Warner and DC Studios would be insane to do anything to harm or stifle Matt Reeves’ plans and projects, since at the moment these are the only DC films and shows doing the sort of business and getting the sort of rave reviews and audience scores the studio desperately needs for the rest of their superhero properties.

With a blockbuster Batman franchise out there doing exactly what made Batman a billion dollar cash cow in the first place, and with proven successful plans for spinoffs to build a larger world of characters in films and series, it begs the question whether the DCU’s own plans and shared universe can live up to the reputation and revenue of Reeves’ so-called The Batman Epic Crime Saga. It certainly makes me wonder how the DCU version of Batman will fare by comparison.

Launching the DCU with an animated R-rated streaming series that feels similar to what we’ve already seen from DC animation and films for years, so soon after the DCEU’s failed ending, is a surprising move. So is kicking off the new plans with a plan that once again starts with a Superman movie positing a world full of heroes who are too violent and who kill, a world that distrusts Superman and even apparently arrests him at one point, while Superman wants to inspire the world and other heroes to be better and work together and inspire people.

That sure sounds an awful lot like exactly how the DCEU started in the first place, including the attempt to jump ahead to a pre-existing universe without doing the setup. Again. Moreover, this Superman also feels a lot like a tonal reset for what could otherwise be a sequel to Man of Steel.

Need I also mention the resemblance between David Corenswet and Henry Cavill? Will this give audiences the impression it is more of the same DCEU — and can trailers and interviews saying “it’s new! trust us!” convince audiences?

Adding to the problem of convincing viewers to trust and turn out is the competition next summer. Superman opens July 11th, just a little over a week after Jurassic World Rebirth and one week before The Smurfs Movie. Then, two weeks later comes the major competition from Fantastic Four: First Steps on July 25th. There are also several notable releases earlier and after Superman bows that will also vie for some of the same target demographics, adding to the challenge.

The icing on the “I’m not sure how this will pan out” cake is the fact Gunn’s made it clear that the new DCU will actually make use of some of the past projects from the DCEU to varying extents — his own The Suicide Squad film and Peacemaker series, for example, are being treated as essentially carryover backstory that will ignore certain direct ties to the DCEU, but otherwise will include some casting and backstory continuation from the DCEU. It feels like a big risk to take when you also need viewers to perceive your projects as a fresh start unburdened by the previous decade of increasingly unpopular films and plans.

Superman’s Future: The Bottom Line

None of this is to comment on the qualitative value of the DCU and what Gunn’s doing so far — my personal preferences and impressions are that I’m going to like this DCU a lot and it has potential to perform at Marvel levels.

But the potential to do so is different from the odds of doing so, and that’s going to be determined by average folks around the world who aren’t plugged into the nuances and details of past and present studio planning and continuity. It’ll be people walking up to the ticket desk at a multiplex and asking, “What should we see tonight?” And it’s up to DC Studios to give those audiences a reason to believe and trust their movies one more time.

Superman hasn’t been box office bulletproof in a long time. We’ll soon find out whether Gunn and the new DCU can provide the sunshine necessary to revive him to his glory once more.