As Henry Cavill’s agents continue to get nowhere in their discussions with Warner Bros. and the #RestoreTheSnyderVerse campaign is failing to gain any traction, it seems increasingly likely that his days in the DCEU are numbered. Cavill was always a promising Superman, but the movies (even alternate versions of them) never did him justice, and all the shakeups in the franchise have made his inclusion in future movies moot. Since Cavill’s Superman is inextricably tied to Ben Affleck’s Batman, his arc will be inconsistent – even more so than it already is – if he suddenly teams up with Robert Pattinson’s Batman in a Justice League reboot. If the DCEU is introducing a new Batman, then it’ll also need a new Superman.
When the time comes to introduce the new Superman, DC should use the same strategy it’s using to introduce Pattinson’s Dark Knight in Matt Reeves’ The Batman. Reeves’ movie is skipping past the Bat’s familiar origin story and focusing on his earlier days as a masked vigilante. Instead of chronicling the origins of the Batman persona, a story that’s been covered by a bunch of other movies, Reeves is chronicling the origins of his street-smarts as he goes out into the field and figures out vigilantism as he goes along.
This portrayal of a younger, more inexperienced Batman is reminiscent of Year One, a seminal comic book arc penned by Frank Miller that tells the story of Bruce Wayne’s first year as a masked crimefighter. Christopher Nolan was heavily influenced by this comic in the second half of Batman Begins (after Batman has begun), and Matt Reeves seems to be drawing inspiration from Miller’s work, too.
Marvel Studios used a similar strategy in introducing Spider-Man to the MCU. When Tom Holland’s Peter Parker first appeared in Captain America: Civil War, he could already do everything a spider can and was already spending his spare time swinging around New York, fighting crime and helping people. His subsequent solo movie, Spider-Man: Homecoming, didn’t bother to rehash Spidey’s origin story, because it’s already been told on the big screen twice in the space of two decades and audiences are plenty familiar with Uncle Ben and his “With great power comes great responsibility” ethos.
A select handful of comic book characters are iconic enough for their origin stories to be common knowledge. Everybody knows Batman’s parents were murdered just like everybody knows Mickey Mouse has round ears. Everybody knows Spider-Man was bitten by a radioactive spider just like everybody knows Darth Vader’s distinctive breathing. Not only does Superman fall into this category; his origin story takes a lot of movie to get through.
A movie that really explores Supes’ origins in depth, like Man of Steel (which is still less than a decade old), has to introduce Krypton, introduce Kal-El and his parents, establish a world-ending threat, follow Kal-El all the way to Earth, introduce the Kents, slowly introduce each of the many superhuman abilities given to him by the yellow sun, send him to Metropolis, give him a job at the Daily Planet, and introduce him to Lois Lane. All in all, that’s bound to take up at least half of the movie. That time should be spent exploring sides of the Superman character that haven’t been depicted on-screen before.
When Warner Bros. inevitably reboots the Superman franchise, the movie should jump past the origin story and dive into Superman’s early superhero career. Instead of using one of the time-tested villains seen in all the previous movies, like Lex Luthor and General Zod, this potential reboot could contrast a fledgling, inexperienced Superman with a beloved villain that moviegoers haven’t seen before – one that the younger Superman isn’t quite prepared to face. Brainiac could outsmart a naive, young Supes, or Metallo could best him in combat.
As an unwavering do-gooder with very few weaknesses and pretty much every conceivable type of strength, Superman doesn’t present a lot of opportunities for dramatic conflict in his stories. Zack Snyder responded to this by making Clark Kent a more brooding, conflicted figure, but Supes already has an interesting, unique conflict in the comics. Superman can do everything and save anyone, so his only conflict is that he’s not able to be in more than one place, so he’ll never be able to save everybody who needs to be saved.
Supes would’ve had to come to terms with this inner turmoil within a few months of first donning the cape and realizing that people will inevitably die on his watch, no matter how hard he tries or how much of his time he dedicates to superheroics. A new Superman movie could explore a kind of Year One arc for the last son of Krypton (which actually happened in the comics a couple of years ago) as he starts out with the means to be a superhero, but not necessarily the courage or the know-how or the grace under pressure.