James Gunn’s cinematic intro to the DCU, Superman, has made its way to theaters, and the movie is bizarrely similar to the 2017 version of Justice League in one key way, while also succeeding over it in another. Superman focuses upon the Man of Steel (David Corenswet) as he is the subject of a smear campaign by the villainous Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), with Superman losing public favor while also dealing with backlash over his intervention in a foreign military conflict. Not unlike Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies and The Suicide Squad, Superman has enjoyed a generally positive reception with many praising the movie’s sense of fun and light-hearted story with lots of comic relief.
All of the above are, interestingly, qualities attributed to the theatrical cut of Justice League, but from a far more disparaging angle. Due to the nature of Justice League and Superman’s respective production histories, the former is remembered as a trainwreck barely worthy of being called a movie at all, while the latter actually succeeds at being a genuinely sincere embodiment of the qualities Justice League 2017 tried and utterly failed to cobble together.
Justice League Was WB’s (Disastrous) Attempt To Course Correct DC Into A Lighter Tone
Justice League 2017 is a classic case of a studio making every possible wrong decision on a movie that is meant to be the pay-off moment for an ongoing franchise. Owing to Batman v Superman’s divisive reception, Warner Bros. effectively caved to online discourse that suggested that the DCEU needed to be more tonally and stylistically in sync with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While Zack Snyder and WB had been at odds throughout Justice League’s production over the direction of the movie, Snyder’s departure from the movie after the tragic death of his daughter led to the studio giving the movie a near-total overhaul just six months before its November 2017 release, with Avengers director Joss Whedon coming in to significantly reshoot and rework Justice League (along with Whedon reportedly horribly mistreating the cast and crew throughout the reshoots).
The end result of Justice League 2017 was a barely passable shell of a movie with terrible color grading, lackluster action scenes, and a tonal inconsistency between Snyder and Whedon’s footage stapled together into a two-hour edit. The eventual release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League after the famed #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign showed just how ill-conceived the reshoots were, with the far better received Snyder Cut now largely seen as the definitive version of Justice League and theatrical cut an infamous relic or bad studio decision making. What’s interesting about James Gunn’s Superman is how much similar it is to Justice League 2017, minus all of the behind-the-scenes nastiness that gave birth to it.
Superman Is Tonally Similarly To Justice League, But From The Ground Up
Justice League 2017 and Superman are, in many ways, cut from the same cloth in terms of their respective portrayals of the Man of Steel and of the larger DC Universe. Both have a light-hearted, four-quadrant, family-friendly style, with Superman a quippy, upbeat hero who won’t so much as allow a squirrel to perish in the midst of a battle with a thirty-story kaiju. Both also are attempts to move DC on film away from the Snyderverse, albeit in different ways and with different intentions behind them – Justice League 2017 being a last minute attempt to warp Snyder’s mostly complete Justice League an Avengers clone, and Gunn’s Superman a more earnest introduction to a new cinematic Superman not connected to Snyder’s version.
Granted, the path to Gunn’s Superman coming to be has plenty of baggage of its own, specifically with the dismissal of Henry Cavill from the Superman role being intrinsically linked to its genesis, and many fans (justifiably) upset over that. Justice League 2017 was also an embarrassment for Cavill’s Superman in its own way through Superman’s infamous CGI mustache disaster in the film. Nonetheless, Gunn’s Superman does the one thing that Justice League 2017 didn’t in trying to be a cheerful, colorful cartoon from its conception all the way through the completion of post-production, as opposed to trying to retrofit those elements into an already filmed and stylistically completely different movie. Funnily enough, Gunn’s Superman is yet another highlight of the infamy of Justice League 2017, and by extension the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, as ones that WB and DC still have not managed to leave behind.
Superman Shows The Importance Of Superhero Movies Committing To A Style & Tone From The Very Start
Wherever one stands on James Gunn’s Superman and the early DCU, the movie itself is clearly the one that Gunn and everyone involved had decided to make right from the beginning. I personally found it to be overall good without being epic, but most certainly well below Man of Steel, but it is definitely the Superman movie James Gunn envisioned, scripted, directed, and wanted to make. That’s a far cry from Justice League 2017, a would-be superhero epic that no one involved was the least bit proud of (Joss Whedon included if that “I tried” sign right before his screenwriting credit in Justice League is any indication). Additionally, by committing to a clear vision of what it wanted to be, Gunn’s Superman has set the DCU in motion in relatively successful fashion.
That’s the total inverse from Justice League 2017, a movie that was such an abrupt left turn into MCU territory as to cause a chain reaction negatively impacting the entire DCEU down the line. James Gunn’s Superman is ultimately the product of a production process that was streamlined from the start in every way that Justice League 2017 was not, and it is weirdly yet another highlight upon how much of a blight upon DC’s on film legacy the latter will always be.
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