James Gunn’s DCU has its next Superman movie lined up with Man of Tomorrow, and it might end up being Gunn’s equivalent to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Following the Man of Steel (David Corenswet) putting a stop to Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) in Superman, the Last Son of Krypton’s next confirmed appearance in DCU (barring the Superman cameo that seems to go without saying in Peacemaker Season 2) will be the sequel Man of Tomorrow, set to hit theaters in July 2027. With Lex Luthor still in play as a major villain of the DCU, Man of Tomorrow will bring him back into the story in a way fans have waited to see for ages, with Hoult’s Luthor set to don his flying, armored mech suit for the first time on the big-screen, Lex’s mech suit having thus far only been worn by Jon Cryer and Michael Cudlitz’s Lexs on the Arrowverse and Superman & Lois respectively.
However, that’s not the only twist for Lex Luthor going into Man of Tomorrow, with Lex set to join forces with Superman in the sequel. While superheroes being forced to temporarily align with their arch-nemeses has happened innumerable times in comic book history, the circumstances of why Superman and Lex will unite in Man of Tomorrow is even more intriguing, in that it effectively positions the Superman sequel as a direct DCU parallel to Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman.
Man of Tomorrow Will Involve Superman Teaming Up With Lex Luthor To Defeat A Bigger Threat
Gunn has positioned the story of Man of Tomorrow as one that will see Superman and Lexforced to battle a much larger threat in the sequel, with the artwork released by Gunn showing Lex in his trademark flying mech suit hints to a major battle royale that Superman and Lex are heading into. Gunn has also alluded to who that threat might be in the form of the image of an anatomy textbook shard on social media, showing the inside of a human body, including the brain.
Fans quickly took this as a major hint of Brainiac as the main villain of Man of Tomorrow, and while Gunn has yet to confirm Brainiac’s presence outright, it certainly seems like as good a guess as any. After all, Brainiac has been the Superman who has repeatedly just missed every previous opportunity to debut on the big screen (how sad, indeed, it is that the “discount Brainiac” supercomputer in 1983’s horrendous farce Superman III is the closest the world has seen thus far to a cinematic Brainiac.) Where Man of Tomorrow gets even more interesting is in its only confirmed story detail of Superman joining forces with a former enemy to defeat a much larger villainous threat.
Hmmm, where else have we seen that before in a DC movie?
Man of Tomorrow Sounds A Lot Like The Heroic Dynamic Of Batman v Superman
While Gunn’s Superman operates on a similar story of the Man of Steel finding himself mistrusted by much of the world, partly due to the machinations of Lex Luthor, that is part of the foundation of Batman v Superman, Man of Tomorrow seems to be adapting another crucial element of it with Superman joining forces against a sworn foe. The twist Batman v Superman threw into the mix was in making the Man of Steel’s big enemy for most of the movie the Dark Knight, though even that had comic book precedent with the movie based significantly on Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. While that classic comic book story saw Batman come out of a decade-long retirement with Superman being deployed by the U.S. government to stop him, Batman v Superman took a significantly different approach.
Following the Kryptonian invasion led by General Zod (Michael Shannon) in Man of Steel that Henry Cavill’s Superman stops, Batman v Superman centers on a world divided on the very existence of the Last Son of Krypton, most of all Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne. Looking at the destructive battle of Metropolis and linking Superman to the Kryptonian military that attempted to terraform Earth into a new Krypton, Batman reasons that “if we believe there is even a one percent chance that he is our enemy, we have to take it as an absolute certainty, and we have to destroy him”. This sets Batman and Superman’s showdown in motion, with neither knowing until very late in the game that Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor has been pushing them to duke it out. Eventually, Batman joins forces with Superman to rescue the latter’s kidnapped adoptive mother Martha Kent (Diane Lane), with Batman and Superman then forced to battle Lex’s monstrous creation Doomsday with the help of Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), with Superman making the ultimate sacrifice to stop the beast, leading the formation of the Justice League and resurrection of Superman in Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
Obviously, the broad strokes of Man of Tomorrow are likely to play out quite differently than Batman v Superman’s story. Nonetheless, the basic concept of a cinematic Superman (in his second movie, no less) joining forces with someone who he once considered his most sworn enemy, and who bears a high tech suit of armor explicitly designed to fight Superman himself, to take down a much larger planet-threatening villain is a wild turn of events as the DCU moves along. That speaks both to the legacy of Batman v Superman and to some of the guiding influences Gunn might have in mind for the DCU.
Batman v Superman Remains Highly Impactful & Influential (& May Partly Be Why Man of Tomorrow Is Doing Another Superman Team-Up Story)
With the divisive war waged daily about it since March 25, 2016, Batman v Superman stands as one of the most consequential, discussed, debated, and influential superhero movies of all time. With the movie’s 10th birthday just six months away at the time of this writing, Batman v Superman maintains a presence in the public consciousness that most current blockbusters almost never manage. That longevity has given Zack Snyder’s DC movie trio of Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League a life all their own, right alongside the hope of many fans of seeing his planned five-movie arc through that similarly is nowhere near dying out. All those factors could actually explain, in a complimentary way, the visible influences of Snyder’s DC movies on Superman and Man of Tomorrow.
Having already taken the idea of a world distrusting of the Man of Steel’s intentions and running with it from a different angle in Superman, Gunn might well have found some similar inspiration from Batman v Superman’s story of enemies becoming allies against a bigger threat and adjusted it to fit in the framework of Man of Tomorrow. The key difference seems to be that, with Superman and Lex’s enmity already established in Superman, Gunn might make that a relatively minor element seen at the beginning of Man of Tomorrow before making Superman and Lex’s team-up the main focus of the movie, effectively flipping the enemies-to-allies story ratio seen in Batman v Superman. However it ends up playing out, James Gunn might well be crafting his own spin on the concept of Superman teaming up with his one-time enemy to take down another of his greatest villains seen in Batman v Superman. In that respect, Man of Tomorrow adopting a key element of Batman v Superman might be the highest compliment that the DC Universe of James Gunn could pay to the DC Universe of Zack Snyder, whom Gunn is on record commending as a “consummate filmmaker (and a doubly consummate storyteller).”
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