The Thing about the character Superman is

Cafe Society
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…is that he still needs to be relatable to humans to be a success on screen.

I’m no massive Supe fan. I’ve seen some of the films along the way. Here’s my take, having decided to watch the long-form trailer for the 1978 “Superman” and the official trailer for this coming summer’s “Superman”.

Worth noting: I’m 62 and saw the first “Superman” film as a Junior in High School.

Lots of directors have made hay over the utter invincibility of the character. It was central to moving the first movie’s plot forward and, from what we see in the 2025 version, Superman falls from the sky quite beaten and bloodied.

I’m eager to see how and why he gets beaten and bloodied. This new trailer informs me that he is one of many characters in a universe I know zero about. This guy directed the three “Guardians of The Galaxy” films so I am guessing that this film belongs in that cinema lineage a lot more than it belongs in “Superman” canon.

And yet, there’s the Kent tract house ( which I happen to think is a brilliant twist on the farmhouse in the cornfield trope ). There’s Lois, and so on.

I need to feel something for his humanity, which is not terribly logical because he is not human. This despite the advertising tag-line used prominently in the original 1978 one-sheet. ( It would have been too clunky for it to read, " You will believe an alien creature so closely resembling a man but which is not a man can fly".)

I need to connect to this character for the entire film to work. No matter what the plotlines.

For example, and I suspect for any serious “Superman” aficionados reading this I will get scorched for this, I happen to enjoy “Superman Returns”. Here’s a guy who went on a bit of a walkabout, for good reasons, only to return and find out that he’s got a kid. Supe plays it well, Lois plays it well, even the wee bairn with surprisingly strong upper body strength plays it well.

It comes down to humanity. Yeah, that’s not unique to the “Superman” character or franchises. But here we are, about to be handed another iteration of this iconic fellah.

Make me care about him. Beneath all of the other superheroes and huge EFX, I just want to give a damn about how he’s dealing with the issues and what he does to resolve conflict as a living creature.

2

That’s pretty much it. One of the things I disliked about Man of Steel is that Earth didn’t have enough time to care about Superman. Okay, so some aliens show up, tell us to give up some dude named Kal-El or else. And? What reason do we have to protect this Kal-El? There’s another scene where Superman is fighting Faora in a Denny’s in Smallville and for a second she gets the upper hand. One of the Denny’s employees is the now grown up kid who witnessed a young Clark save the bus when they were all kids. This was a great opportunity to have that guy do something to distract Faora when she gets the upper hand. Throw plates at her, shout at her, something to show us that Clark has made a difference and people care about him.

In the Reeve’s movie, Mr. Kent has a heart attack and Clark realizes that no matter how powerful he is he cannot save everyone. Contrast that with MoS where Clark’s father dies because he sat by and did nothing. Granted his father told him to do nothing, but this didn’t sit well with me. I disliked how Clark’s father was more of a moral center telling him he should do the right thing. When Clark asks if he should have saved that bus his father tells him he’s not sure. He should have said something like, “Yes, it was the right thing to do. I’m just worried about what might happen to you.”

I will give them some points for Clark saying something like “If I was really your son,” only for a tearful Mr. Kent to say, “You are my real son.”

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Yeah. That smacked close to home: Both of my kids are adopted and for many years I was internally braced for that moment when in anger they said, “You’re NOT my father !” It hasn’t happened yet and I’m not the 27 year-old I was when my son was born.

Just as we all draw from those around us, agree that it would have meant more and felt more authentic if people cared- and if HE cared more.

The loss to young Clark in the first Superman movie in 1978 hurts not just because this “super” being realizes how fragile humans from Earth are, but I always felt it set us up cleanly for the discovery of the crystal and the full realizations of the deaths of his entire world. ( Give or take a few petty criminals… )

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Damn, I was hoping this was a crossover with the Man of Steel facing off with the Fantastic 4.

Stranger

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I was hoping he’d be fighting a shape-shifting monster in the Arctic.

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“Who goes there?”

Stranger

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That’s not Krypto…

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Superman’s secret identity is not Clark Kent. Clark’s secret identity is Superman. So if you make the movie about Clark and his family and friends, they are what make him relatable and human and vulnerable. Superman is what he does, not who he is.

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Counterpoint - the family/origin story and the Clark/Kal dichotomy is a thrice-told tale. I want a Superman movie that is about something else, now.
Or I did. Then I got The Boys, and Invincible, and Brightburn. Now I want a happy Supes story that isn’t about the family/secret identity stuff.

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Agreed, although more so with @GuanoLad’s more direct comments:

Which brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from the extremely uneven TV series “Lois and Clark” which is still a semi-guilty pleasure.

“Superman is what I can do; Clark is who I am”

It absolute works better in a TV series where you have a lot of time to spend on the character and their interactions with others, rather than 120-180 minutes of Movie Time that has to allow for one or more big-budget action sequences. But if you want me to care about Superman, then this is the route you’d have to go for me.

Now, @MrDibble points out all of the truly wonderful subversions of the Superman tropes (I have access or physical copies of all three btw), and they make me care in different ways. So if I was doing a new Superman movie, but did not care about some DCU (ha, fat chance), I’d do a great version of some of antihero/villain Superman stories, like Red Son (Soviet superman, there’s an okay animated version already), or better yet, one that looks on Superman as too dangerously powerful and unknowable such as the Luthor graphic novel.

There you see Superman as Luthor chooses to see him. Sure, he claims to be benevolent, but if he changes his mind, or is lying, what can you do? Similar themes come up in Invincible, while in Brightburn, you see a character growing up and becoming increasingly alien and powerful. The fact that the Kents raised a hero out of an unstoppable alien speaks very well of them, or of heavy duty plot armor/arrogance.

But still, back to @MrDibble’s points, we have those stories, and simultaneously, I don’t think most of us believe in Superman’s classic (or the modern version) tagline. So once again, go with Luthor. Show the risk at every moment, and how badly humans will act to prove their suspicions, but let Supes prove his merit by never breaking his own code.

And watch while it makes NO DIFFERENCE in how his threat is evaluated.

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Man of Steel, to its credit, did go this route a little bit.

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It did, but it still largely made Superman the main POV.

I just enjoy watching Superman 100% from the outside, and the art of the specific graphic novel always goes out of it’s way to paint his visage from Luthor’s own POV. Superman still looks like a Greek god in tights, just not one of the ones you want to run into - a wrathful Zeus, whose good temper can never be trusted.

But again that’s what -I- would want to do. And it would probably be a commercial failure, since that’s not what most people want to see (though the popularity of the first Joker movie means I could be wrong). But it would be a lot easier to do as a movie than building a real, deep empathy for Superman as a person in the constricted time frame.

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We don’t need the origin story revisited, but James Gunn shines with ensembles, so Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, Martha and Jonathan Kent, are all inevitable.

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Superman is my favorite superhero. I don’t agree that he needs to be beaten to a pulp to be interesting. As someone else wrote, he is different from Batman in that his true persona is his “secret identity”. He is a good man who does the right thing but also happens to be the most powerful person on Earth.

He uses his power to help others rather than accrue more power for himself. This inspires others to be better people themselves. That isn’t boring and it isn’t far fetched. It’s optimistic about humanity which something we need right now. It’s the core of the character and why he is my favorite.

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Superman is never shown in any kind of realistic world. Irl, he’d be the most famous person on Earth, and Metropolis’s main business would be catering to all the people choking the streets and crowding the rooftops hoping for a glimpse of the guy.

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Heh. You’ve now got me wondering about, uh, the opposite of that, with what could be an even more audience-losing premise: say a guy concludes that, in most scenarios, you can innocuously accomplish more as a bespectacled bystander than by showily parading around as a known-quantity alien: walk, don’t fly, into situations where people let their guard down around people who lack microscopic x-ray vision and superhearing; perform subtle feats of superspeed and superstrength, or work invisible tricks with heat vision or superbreath, while passing yourself off as a mere human who couldn’t possibly be playing saboteur; and otherwise rack up implausible successes in front of folks who figure you have no answer for a locked door or a loaded gun or whatever; as soon as you show up in a cape and tights with underpants on the outside, everyone can react accordingly; as long as you act like a regular guy, you’re more effective.

Or: Superman is who I am; Clark is what I can do.

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ISTM that movie has been made and it is called “The Incredibles”.

Manage family home-life with super hero side-life.

Is that the Superman movie you want to see?

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I’m not sure if that was a reply to my post right above yours, or to someone else’s. But if it was to mine, I didn’t say anything about family home-life, or indicate that superheroing was the side-life; the idea would be that he’s superheroing while acting like a guy who has no powers, because he figures that — even if doing it as like unto a full-time job — it’s usually more sensible to go about it in civilian garb, while pretending to need bifocals, than to leap tall buildings in a single bound as a costumed weirdo.

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I would go see your movie. And I’d love it. “Clark Kent, Reporter!”

I’m a huge Superman fan, partly because of how hard it is to write a good story when a character is that powerful (especially Back In The Day, when lazy editors kept giving him more powers… and random ones, at that).

The key, for me, is focusing on his humanity, which the previous movies failed at. In the middle of Batman vs Superman, I said “Why should I care about this guy? He’s been written as an unapproachable god.”

So I’m excited about seeing Clark Kent working at the Daily Planet with people who care about him…

… and he has a dog!
(I might have squealed when Kyrpto showed up.)

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It always occurred to me that Superman could end Batman in a blink (literally laser beam eyes) if he was of of a mind to.

Superman is not invulnerable though. Just close.