James Gunn has been talking all things DCU as of late and, just weeks ago, he hyped up fans when he officially announced Man of Tomorrow, the follow-up to his Superman reboot. While Gunn's first Supes flick (now streaming with an HBO Max subscription) is quite sunny, it sounds like the sequel will be different. The next installment leans less “four-color spectacle” and will feature Superman and Lex Luthor sharing the film’s focus. That shift alone is promising, but it’s Gunn’s view of Lex that has me most excited.
Gunn unpacked the tonal pivot while appearing on the podcast The House of R (shared to their YouTube) with Mallory Rubin. While he joined the show to talk about Peacemaker Season 2, Gunn eventually pivoted to the Kryptonian of it all. If you want the goods straight from the source, that episode is the one to cue up. When it comes to his vision for Kal-El's next big-screen outing, Gunn had this to tease:
The story in Man of Tomorrow, it is slightly tonally different from Superman… Superman’s more comic-booky in some ways than Man of Tomorrow, and it has to do with the dual characters of Lex and Superman at the center of Man of Tomorrow and other things.
Superman did indeed feel like a comic book come to life in all the best ways. Still, I'm intrigued by the notion of James Gunn scaling back on that for his follow-up. What's interesting, though, is that Gunn then went full character-study mode on Lex. The former Guardians of the Galaxy helmer continued:
I think I'm just more interested in getting into the heart of Lex and seeing how he fits into all of this. I think getting to know more of Lex as a human being. I think we saw a lot about the evil part of Lex. He's pretty evil… I think he, as a character, is really interesting. There's something, despite everything, that is incredibly heroic about Lex. Take aside morality, which is hard to do, but here is this guy who’s saying, 'You can hold up a building. You can shoot down planes with your eyes. Fuck you, I'm going to kick your ass because I'm better than you.’ I can't help but admire his tenacity and his ego. I mean, his ambition is beyond compare.
That framing should be catnip for longtime DC fans. We already know Man of Tomorrow is going to lean into a “dual protagonists” lens, allowing the Last Son of Krypton and his longest-running nemesis to have a clash of ideals, and not just a rematch of brawn.
I'm particularly fascinated by this concept because if you’re a fan of new DC movies, you know that, for the most part, across most media, Lex often is portrayed as a very one-dimensional character without much depth. For depth, you have to go to TV adaptations like Smallville or the incredible Superman: The Animated Series.
Gunn isn’t necessarily setting out to redeem Lex but is making an effort to make him a human character. The point isn’t to excuse the villainy, it’s to give the man under the bald head definition and depth. A human who looks at a flying god and says, “I’m better” is inherently dramatic. If MoT goes where I think it's going to go–cough, Brainiac, cough–then I think we are in for a truly unique film in the pantheon of best Superman movies, the likes of which we have never seen before.
If Superman is the bright-eyed thesis of the first chapter of the new DCU, then Man of Tomorrow sounds like the antithesis—we might be in store for our “Dark Knight” of Big Blue movies. And, with Gunn talking this way about Lex, I’m officially bracing for a sequel that treats Luthor not as a prop, but as a character worthy of our full attention, just as much as he Man of Steel himself.
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