“This trailer was actually much more difficult than the movie,” James Gunn laughs when discussing the teaser trailer release for his much-anticipated new Superman movie, which you can watch below…
Superman is set to be released next July and has been written and directed by Gunn, who became co-chairmen and co-CEO of DC Studios back in 2022, alongside Peter Safran.
“The film is optimistic yet not without its darker moments,” he explains of the new movie. “It’s a big science fiction movie, but at the same time, incredibly grounded in the way we treat the characters and everything else. I wanted it to be something that was the essence of Superman, that was the Superman that I grew up with, that I loved, but also something new at the same time.”
As a Superman fan, taking on such an iconic character has not been lost on Gunn: “Taking on Superman has been paradoxical for me because you want to do something totally new, and yet you want to do something that is traditional. I think it ended up being easier than I thought in some ways because the traditional aspects of Superman – the hope, the honesty, the goodness and the gung-ho qualities of Superman in this day and age, end up being pretty wild and alternative, almost. I think that’s really the heart of what the movie is.
“I was interested in the idea of being able to create a Superman movie that people could relate to, but I didn’t know how to go about it, and it actually took me a little bit of work to get to the place where I had the light go off. I think taking on the challenge of that initial work, trying to work on the idea of Superman (and this was before I was even at DC), I think is probably the thing I’m one of the things I’m proud of.”
A clear element of the new Superman trailer is its score (written by John Murphy), which clearly pays tribute to the 1978 Superman movie score, originally written by John Williams. “The John Williams score is maybe my favorite score of all time, with the exception of a couple of Ennio Morricone scores. It’s one of the biggest scores of all time. When I saw the (1978) movie as a child, the thing I liked the most was the score. So I wanted to pay tribute to that.
“When I first talked to John Murphy, who’s our composer, I was like ‘listen, I want you to do something completely out there’. This is a score based movie. It is not a song based movie, like the other movies have been. It is all about this score, a score that we’ve been working on as hard as we’ve been working on the movie from long before the screenplay was even finished, John and I have been working and sending notes back and forth. I always wanted at least part of the Williams theme in there as part of something.
“Sometimes it’s a little hard to say I want you to rework somebody else’s music and John Murphy just took to the challenge 100% and made something really beautiful. He’s done something miraculous. I think, again, it’s a mix of the new and the traditional in a way that we haven’t quite seen. But also, I think, it is soul food.”
The trailer also clearly shows the relationship between Superman/Clark Kent (played by David Corenswet) and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan). “The relationship between Clark and Lois, I think, is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in any media, for Lois and Superman,” Gunn reveals. “When we were auditioning these actors for these roles, I wanted actors who had chemistry together. We had three actors for Superman, and three actors for Lois, and we put them all together. David and Rachael were incredible individually, but when we brought them together, there was an electricity in the room that was palpable.
“Part of it is the steaminess, the sexiness of it, but part of is just the way they bounce off of each other, in the way that 1940s movie stars do, with a Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. So it’s this miraculous energy between the two of them. When you see them together in the more loving aspects, you go, ‘Oh, these guys like each other in a real way’. It’s hot, but also in the way when they’re together, you go, ‘okay, I get it’.
“He’s the man of steel. He’s the most powerful man in the world, perhaps. But man, she’s a force to be reckoned with, and you can see there’s a way in which she can mow him down. So it’s the back and forth between the two of them, where they’re both so powerful, and you see what they give each other as a couple, and you feel that chemistry.”
Starring alongside Corenswet and Brosnahan is Nicholas Hoult, who plays Lex Luthor. “Nick Holt is Lex Luthor and every woman in my life was like, oh my god, I love me a bald man,” laughs Gunn. “He’s intimidating. He’s a badass, but he’s got his reasons. He’s not without his reasons for what he’s doing. I think Nick is just a fantastic actor to work with, and I loved working with him.”
As the director of Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, Gunn is no stranger to dealing with aliens and for Superman, he confirms that the movie won’t ignore our hero’s alien origins: “His heritage is a big part of what the movie is about,” Gunn confirms. “His genealogy is a part of what the movie is about, and how he incorporates that into his life. But at the end of the day, Superman is a very human character, despite his alien descent. It’s what makes him special in a way, and what makes him important beyond what his powers are, and where he came from.
“What’s important is his character. What’s important is, you know who he is, his choices, and I think we see that in the film, but definitely it’s not something that we skirt around is the fact that he’s an alien.”
Gunn also confirms that although the look of the movie seems very much like the classic Silver Age of Comics, that’s not necessarily where the story will lay. “I love the Silver Age of Comics in terms of the aesthetics of it, but it isn’t completely that,” he confirms. “It’s taking the character of Superman and really getting into who he is as an individual and what his personal obstacles are in this film. That’s a really big difference from not only other Superman movies, but other superhero films.
“This is a story about a man and both his external and his internal obstacles and what he’s facing in life. That’s what the film is about. So although some of the imagery is very Silver Age, I don’t think that’s a very Silver Age kind of plot. So it has elements of both, the traditional and the new, and I think that’s where we find our balance.
“All-Star Superman is the thing that we borrow the most heavily from. Our plot has nothing to do with All Star Superman, but some of the aesthetics of what Grant wrote and what Frank drew, were incredibly influential. They also had that sort of science fiction [element], and the idea of Lex as a mad science sorcerer, almost. All-Star Superman was my biggest influence, for sure.”
Although the official synopsis of Superman is yet to be released, Gunn confirms that this is “Superman’s story”.
“It’s a story about Superman, and it’s also about the trio of Superman, Lois and Lex, and how they interact, ” he explains. “Then there are other very important characters, like Mr. Terrific and Krypto.”
Oh yes, we can’t forget about Krytpo, Superman’s loyal dog. However, when listening to Gunn, perhaps he isn’t quite the good boy we see in the first trailer… “You’ll see in the movie that Krypto probably comes off as a better dog in the trailer than he is in the movie,” he laughs. “He’s a pretty terrible dog. You love him because he’s a dog, and how can you not? He’s got the cute, innocent eyes, but he’s a terrible dog!”
Superman is asking Krypto to take him home in the trailer, and that sentiment is something that is integral to the new movie, says Gunn. “I think that this is a place where we can all go home – to a character that we love, to the simplicity of the morals and goodness and love that Superman embodies as a character. I would hope that Superman does unify us a little bit because he is just about those core values that everyone believes in.
“That we can all go home to Superman this summer is something that could be a good thing for us.”
Superman will be released in cinemas on 11 July 2025