Yeah, that was why the WW2 comics didn’t have Superman just flying over to Berlin and scooping up Hitler, say.
Right. To me, the whole purpose of superheroes is to deal with the outliers - the superpowered villains, the monsters, the aliens - that regular humanity is simply not equipped to handle. I don’t want to see them fixing real-world problems; they’re for the real world to fix.
We expect that today. Back in the 40s there was a paucity of supervillains and aliens, the heroes fought mostly bad guys of various sorts. Batman had a cadre of weirdos that popped up repeatedly, yet the Joker and the Riddler and Two-Face had no super powers. The 50s saw the DC heroes taking on monsters in the infantile sf days. Not until Marvel did each superhero beget a corps of true supervillains as rotating cover fodder. Then came the inevitable outdo the last guy spiral that eventually saw Spider-Man battle Galactus. (Yeah, they cheated by giving him special powers and having him trick Galactus, who’s pretty stupid for a cosmic-level entity.)
The point is that the stakes for movie superheroes have also spiraled upward. If the entire universe isn’t at risk, the movie is a bore. That’s not where comics started out. I think movies have hurt themselves badly. Saving the universe is incomprehensible. Going up from there is worse. Marvel people are saving the multiverse now. Nobody understands what that means, nobody has any visceral connection with such a battle.
Except for Superman, heroes (with some exceptions) were ordinary people with skills or weapons or sheer grit and courage beyond the norm. They were Hawkeye or the Black Widow or, primus inter pares, The Batman.
Superman, yeah, doesn’t fit into that category. The grand exception, there to save all of us and then go home (Or be late for work. They don’t call it the Daily Planet for nothing.) He apparently will fight some stupid Godzilla clone, ugh, though I’m sure something else bloodied him in the opening scene. Trailers tease us, give us hope. I hope the new Superman isn’t stupid all the way through. Given everything else in the world, that’s a hope small enough to cling to.
Arguably, Superman originated as an inverted knockoff of John Carter, who could leap extraordinary distances and had superhuman strength in the low gravity of Barsoom.
One of the radio stations here plays old classic radio programs every evening; one of the regular features is the “Adventures of Superman” serial. They’re typically running episodes from the mid-to-late '40s, and it’s consistent with what you describe: he’s usually dealing with mundane villains (gangsters, spies, evil scientists, etc.), sometimes with the help of Batman and Robin.
According to Steranko’s History of Comics, Superman was probably more directly inspired by Philip Wylie’s novel Gladiator, about a scientist who injects his pregnant wife with a super-strength formula, producing eventually a son who was immensely strong with skin tough enough to deflect bullets, and John Campbell’s Aarn Munro stories, about a man raised on a high-gravity planet, making him strong enough to make prodigious leaps (as John Carter does). (The first Aarn Munro story contains the line “To Infinity and Beyond!”, by the way). There’s also more than a bit of Doc Savage, who was THe Man of Bronze. Superman, being better, was The Man of Steel.
Man, that trailer has one mission: Help guys convince their gals to go see another comic book movie. Superman lies bleeding in the snow - the guys are already sold as the gals roll their eyes at the prospect of another dark and violent DC offering. Then, BAM! The cutest fucking dog in the world, followed by heartthrob Nicholas as the villain and concluding with a recreation of the most romantic scene from any superhero movie ever. For once, the guy won’t be the one dragging his date to see a superhero pic.
Man, you must really have missed the past 15 years of comic-book movies if you think it’s a still an exclusively male-oriented genre.
The average Doper these days is in their 60s or so. “Missing the last 15 years” comes with the territory. 
Well, I’m 50 and my wife has dragged me to more superhero movies than I have her - and neither of us are comic book readers, just general-purpose geeks.
My wife’s enthusiasm for the MCU surpassed mine somewhere around the time of the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but you couldn’t pay her to see another grimy DC flick after the first Nolan Batman…unless it had a cute dog in it.
I would say James Gunn is deliberately moving away from the dark and grimy aesthetic, and probably is hoping for a wide audience appeal by doing that, but I doubt he’s being quite so cynical to throw in romance clichés to appeal to women. That seems a bit too outdated an approach to demographics to me. It’s there because the Clark and Lois relationship is central to who Superman is.
That, I’ll give you, although my wife is more of a cat person.
A new sneak peak clip was released a couple of days ago.
And now the trailer. LOVE this!
Except, in this case, when it literally did.
Actually it was Gladiator by Philip Wylie, a character with much of Superman’s powers.
The first published review is out. I would take it with a grain of salt, but the review is negative.
It has some spoilers about the plot, but I didn’t feel spoiled by reading it.
A few short spoiler free reviews I saw on Bluesky were really positive so . Looking forward to Saturday when I see it.
I agree.
Nice to add them in.
Unless you are talking animated, in which case DC wins.
But of course there was Superman! 1978, which started the whole idea, more or less. The Dark Knight, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Shazam!, and Joker.
vs
The Marvels, Eternals. Captain America: Brave New World, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and several other recent MCU films.
Basically, DC hit a low spot when zack was allowed free rein, whereas The MCU high point seems to have come and gone.
Oh good. Unless it is an obscure hero, origin stories are passe. That is why I am NOT looking forward to Fantastic Four First Steps.
Not to mention Joss Whedon, with the snappy dialogue that gave juuust enough humor.
Captain Marvel, the recent DCU one, seems pretty super also.
But Supes have several weaknesses- his friends, family, kryptonite, and magic.
I like The JLA films.
Supergirl had Streaky.
Yep.
In the 1978 film, Sups did just the right amount of doing small more mundane things- he even rescued a cat from a tree!
Not like it used to be.
They deleted it.