Superman Deserves His Own Sequel
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It’s exhausting to start talking about the future of a film franchise when we’ve barely had time to sit with the latest—and in this case, first—installment, but this is the cinematic universe we live in. Superman hadn’t been out for a full week before DCU head honcho James Gunn started teasing a poster for Supergirl, the next film queued for his new universe due summer 2026. Gunn’s slate is exciting for sure: the glimpse of Milly Alcock’s Supergirl that we get in her cousin’s movie promises a fun adventure of her own, and Gunn’s Superman script also found a way to spotlight heroes like Green Lantern and Mr. Terrific so successfully that they almost threaten to out-rizz Supes in his own film. And as of this week, a Wonder Woman reboot is apparently also being fast-tracked.
Despite Gunn and his affable star downplaying the stakes, Superman needed to work—and it did. It left me charmed and ready to implicitly trust Gunn’s vision for leading some of the greatest heroes to ever do it into a new era of silver screen representation. And based on the reviews, the box office, and the social-media temperature, the masses agree. We will most certainly see David Corenswet in the trunks again—in a recent appearance on the Happy, Sad, Confused Podcast, Gunn teased he’s writing a script in which Superman is very prominent. But while the promise of seeing the Justice League unite and all that is exciting, to me, the most interesting thing they could do right now would be to just give us a good old fashioned Superman 2.
It’s crazy to consider in a century that only gets more obsessed with superhero blockbusters with each decade, but to this date the Man of Steel has not been fortunate enough to get a second solo run. Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns requel in 2006 did well at the box office, but the overall critical and fan reception was too tepid to greenlight a follow-up, and before long, everyone else moved on. In a thirsty effort to box with Marvel and the Avengers, the warm reception to Zack Snyder’s 2013 Man of Steel reboot inspired DC leadership to skip several steps and go right into Batman v Superman with a two-part Justice League film to follow—and we all know how that turned out. What’s more, Ben Affleck completely washes Cavill and steals BvS out from under him. That’s not a knock and more of an inevitability; Cavill was a solid Clark Kent but Batman—and in turn, Ben Affleck—is just inherently cooler.
But now that David Corenswet has officially won over everyone except the vocal minority who will ride for Snyder and Cavill for as long as Twitter has a free tier, the coolest move Gunn and his co-head Peter Safran could make would be to give us the first Superman 2 (or whatever they want to title it) since 1980, even though it’s the character’s third reboot. Another Superman movie, fully about Clark Kent’s world, one that isn’t burdened with advancing the DCU as a whole.
