James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy could be the culmination of his movie career

With hindsight, this feels prefer it was inevitable. But when James Gunn took to social media in early March to announce he would direct Superman: Legacy, the first main movie in the new DC Studios initiative devised by himself and producer Peter Safran, the information got here as an advanced shock to followers — and, it appears, to the filmmaker himself.

Gunn, identified for his frankness on social platforms, beforehand admitted a hesitancy to direct the movie. “Just because I write something doesn’t mean I feel it in my bones, visually and emotionally, enough to spend over two years directing it,” he said on Twitter. “Especially not something of this magnitude.” That’s not precisely a reassuring show of confidence for followers who’ve waited (and waited) for a brand new solo Superman movie to spring forth from Warner Bros. since Man of Steel muscled its method into theaters 10 years in the past. Gunn’s reticence would appear to dim the prospects for Superman: Legacy.

But Gunn is promoting himself quick. Heck, all of us would possibly be. Over the years, the 56-year-old filmmaker has turn into greater than a Troma provocateur or the former golden boy at Marvel Studios; he’s turn into a considerate, succesful storyteller by way of the tasks he’s made, be they grody, goofy, or nice. The Suicide Squad, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2, and shortly Vol. 3, plus low-budget fare like Super, The Specials, and Brightburn have all performed a job in the growth of Gunn’s distinctive voice as a producer, author, and director. For me, all of it provides as much as Superman: Legacy having the probability to be the movie filmgoers have been hoping to expertise since Christopher Reeve hung up his cape all these years in the past.

Gunn’s path to Superman actually started with superheroes. The Specials, his first credited post-Troma Entertainment work wherein he wrote, produced and co-starred (as the shrinking hero Minuteman, not pronounced the method you suppose), featured an off-beat Justice League draped in late-’90s douchery. The Specials is a roil of Gunn proto-matter that froths with the type of materials that will later make him well-known (or notorious): Ceaseless quips, fraught relationships, impromptu dance sequences, disappointment and ennui.

The Specials established different Gunn fixtures, like his affinity for misfits and needle drops. Specials is actual Y2K lounge lizard super-stuff, fleshed out by an impeccable solid (together with Thomas Haden Church, Judy Greer, and Rob Lowe) and boosted/hampered by omnipresent pop music, with a slight whiff of Daniel Clowes emanating from its skeezy innards. But threaded in its laconic Gen-X jadedness is a reverence for the weirdo superhero comics Gunn devoured as a child. “I learned how to read on them and have been reading them ever since,” he posted on Instagram in 2018. “Few things give me the comfort that a good comic book does.”

Gunn looks as if the variety of comics reader who absorbs his favourite writers’ tips of the commerce. As a fan of Alan Moore, he flexed grimmer storytelling chops with Super, a scuzzy, low-budget function that juggled dirtbag comedy with a vigilante energy fantasy akin to the Rorschach character Moore devised with co-creator Dave Gibbons on Watchmen. Super pulls all kinds of comic-coded tips to maximise the twisted, sexually repressed mania of Frank (Rainn Wilson). While the motley crew of The Specials is made up of archetypes yanked from many years’ value of cape comics, a deconstruction of these archetypes is what props up Super.

Image: IFC Films

Frank, also called the Crimson Avenger, is a step ahead for Gunn as a storyteller. Super is a refinement of his misfit trope; Frank finds a fellow traveler in Libbie (Elliot Page), one other eccentric who indulges violent urges commanded by darker need. Through them, the movie adeptly contends with themes of isolation and habit, the latter of which Gunn has publicly mentioned is one thing he has battled with himself. As the movie’s director, Gunn exorcises private demons with Super in the method he’s greatest suited to: by way of cinematic catharsis in all its myriad kinds. Super is cathartic, and if its depictions of alienation really feel sincere, it’s as a result of James Gunn was as soon as a misfit himself. He should contemplate himself to be one, who can say.

Then there’s Brightburn, an edgelord riff on the Superman origin produced by Gunn and written by his brothers Mark and Brian. It’s a vicious what-if that distorts classes from Moore’s playbook by basically plopping the British author’s brutal Kid Miracleman character on the Kent household farm. The movie’s defacto “Kents” (performed by Elizabeth Banks and David Denman) are depicted as self-interested rural-hip varieties who try an Old Yeller-style coup on their alien son (Jackson A. Dunn) when his unusual skills and alien heritage flip him hostile.

It’s a slasher movie with superpowers, and its clumsy execution bangs towards any advanced familial implications the Gunns have been reaching for. Still, whereas many rightfully level to Brightburn as antithetical to the optimism of Superman, tucked into its framework exists components that talk to the chaos of a household rising aside, and as the Superman character has acquired extra depth as the years have handed, so too have varied interpretations of his relationship with his dad and mom — each terrestrial and additional. Brightburn makes gestures to that complexity, which is given further heft by way of the life experiences of the Gunn household.

When he tweeted to the world that he would direct Superman: Legacy, Gunn famous that the movie’s launch date of July 11, 2025 lands on the birthday of his late father, Jim Gunn. “He was my best friend,” he says. “He didn’t understand me as a kid, but he supported my love of comics and my love of film and I wouldn’t be making this movie now without him.” His sophisticated relationship with his father and reverence for misfits informs extra of Gunn’s work as he will get older. The Suicide Squad reaches its emotional crescendo as Ratcatcher II (Daniela Melchior) stands as much as Starro the Conqueror, emboldened by a couple of phrases imparted by her pricey, departed dad (Taika Waititi, in a surprisingly efficient cameo). “Why rats, Papa?” she asks, in reminiscence, to which her father replies: “Rats are the lowliest and most despised of all creatures, my love. But if they have purpose, so do we all.”

Image: Marvel Studios

The idea of fathers educating their youngsters about function takes a corkscrew flip in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Here, the residing planet Ego (Kurt Russell) makes an attempt to make use of his son Peter (Chris Pratt) to imbue the cosmos with his affect by way of heightened sci-fi contrivances. As Ego manipulates Peter by interesting to his private self-importance, it takes the relationships he’s constructed with Drax (Dave Bautista), Rocket (Bradley Cooper), Groot (Vin Diesel), and Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) to tug him again right down to terra firma. But what makes Peter resolve to destroy his organic father — the poignant killing blow of the total movie — is the realization that he’d already had a full life with one other father determine, thorny and fraught with emotional risks although it was. “He may have been your father, boy,” Yondu (Michael Rooker) tells Peter as Ego lastly implodes on himself. “But he wasn’t your daddy.”

The synopsis for Superman: Legacy tells of the character’s “journey to reconcile his Kryptonian heritage with his human upbringing as Clark Kent of Smallville, Kansas.” Superman, if nothing else, is comicdom’s quintessential misfit, an orphaned alien youngster raised on Earth who finds inside power by way of relationships with these he cares about. Legacy will discover Superman’s struggles to seek out himself, and with Gunn at the helm, there’s little doubt the journey will be uncooked, messy, exuberant, and human in all the ways in which James Gunn could make it. It’s not a leap to say his total career has been constructing to this second.

The imminent launch of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 marks the finish of one other period in Gunn’s career. Troma taught him all he wanted to find out about filmmaking, The Specials on by way of to Super made him hone these strategies into one thing recognizably nice, and his tenure at Marvel Studios, his most profitable but as a director, pushed him to a broader horizon with increased stakes. With Superman: Legacy, a brand new quantity begins.