One of the big questions hovering, majestically, over James Gunn’s upcoming Superman is what kind of tone the July 11, 2025 film will aim for. On the one hand: Twenty-plus years into his directing career, Gunn has proven himself basically incapable of making a completely serious movie. On the other, this thing is undeniably the most “serious” film of his career: The all-important tentpole of his whole redesigned DC Comics universe, which has to succeed, or the whole enterprise goes sliding off a cliff. Nobody who’s ever sat down and watched the old Christopher Reeve movies would claim Superman can’t be funny, but the degree to which Gunn’s subversive tendencies were going to clash with the mythmaking the film demands, by its very nature, has been an open question mark for a minute now.
At least a bit of that ambiguity has now been cleared up, courtesy of a lengthy sneak peek for the film that went live on the internet this evening, after premiering at CinemaCon earlier this week. Said clip (which includes a long set of scenes, expanding from some stuff we saw during the film’s first teaser trailer) suggests that Gunn intends to walk a very tricky tightrope here. We’re clearly meant to understand that whatever ass-kicking David Corenswet’s Kal-El got right before the clip starts was serious, bordering on life-threatening. But Gunn also clearly wasn’t able to keep his inner geek from recreating classic Silver Age touches like the robots that populate this version of the Fortress Of Solitude—or his inner comedy nerd from casting his Creature Commandos star Alan Tudyk to voice one of those bots in typically dry fashion. That’s to say nothing of the presence of very-good-but-also-very-bad dog Krypto, who can’t help but inflict a few more roughhousing wounds on his master before actually saving his life. Gunn is clearly going for something just a tad more sincere than, say, his Guardians Of The Galaxy movies, but with the same basic ethos that including a few jokes doesn’t mean you can’t make the punches land as hard as superhumanly possible, either.
The trailer concludes with a lot of footage we’ve mostly seen before, showing off the various metahumans who will be populating this version of the DC Universe, including major villains like Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor, and Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner wig. (At least, we feel extremely antagonized every time we see that thing.) It also doesn’t skimp on composer John Murphy’s take on John Williams’ classic score, suggesting Gunn and Warner Bros. are ready to let the hype train on the film kick into high gear in the last three months before it finally comes out.
