James Gunn Getting Too Close To Zack Snyder In Superman Defenses

I’m curious how many knee-jerk reactions even a minor site like mine is going to get saying things like that before I’m heard out. Yes, Gunn is more upbeat than Snyder when it comes to Superman. Yes, he might even be a better director. I have yet to see James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn but going by reviews by people whose opinion I trust until I just got done listening to reviews, the movie sound kind of mid, with Mister Terrific doing more rescuing than Superman. Superman saves a little girl and a squirrel, but Michael Holt is the one who saves Lois and saves more people. Again, that’s from what I hear from people I trust to give an honest assessment from haters and…kind of likers alike. We aren’t talking about the movie directly, but some of the decisions made, and how Gunn defends them.

Zack “if you think heroes won’t kill you live in a fantasy world so shut up and watch my fantasy world where heroes kill” Snyder keeps trying to defend his poorly received story decisions in Man Of Steel, and the more he does the more I turn against it. I still stand by my initial review: Man Of Steel was a decent superhero movie but a bad Superman adaptation. Many of his story ideas were controversial, but he would come out and tell you it was actually really good and you’re just a hater for not liking his superior takes on Batman, Superman, and the rest of the Justice League.

Well, Gunn made a few adaptation errors of his own. I don’t mean the ones necessary between media types, I mean things that break multiversal continuity, including one he could have easily rolled back but doubled down on. So if somehow you haven’t heard spoilers for the former Superman: Legacy, there will be some here as I look into some of Gunn’s comments while I was on break and yesterday, and how, like Snyder, it shows more interest in his vision than happy fans.

The Killer Superman

Let’s start with giving credit where it’s due, lest you think I’m just here to trash James Gunn. He appeared with other actors on a Wired video answering questions about Superman that show up the most in Google’s search engine. One of the questions is about Superman not killing.

I like how the video editor fact checks Gunn on “best” Superman stories. Sadly “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice, And The American Way”, the comic that Superman Vs. The Elite adapts, wasn’t mentioned. Frankly, we all have our own favorite Superman stories. I have mine. Needed two articles to list them all (and still isn’t a full list), and a separate one for my favorite takes outside of comics, which I don’t see the DC Gunniverse being part of.

Question #33, at the 10:32 mark, has the question “Why doesn’t Superman kill?”, and David Coresweat (who finally says the “American Way” line) seems to understand Superman better than James Gunn.

“I think the main reason is that he sees the good in just about everybody, maybe to a fault,” said Corenswet in true Big Blue fashion, “and so he even sees the good in those trying to do him harm.”

Thanks to Bounding Into Comics for pointing this video out and the transcription to quickly copy/paste. I have a bunch of articles to go through and this speeds things up. Anyway, Gunn’s take isn’t as extreme as Snyder’s.

Meanwhile, though Gunn agreed, “Yeah, I believe [Superman] believes in a basic right to life. I mean, I think that [killing] is just not in him,” he did not think the hero would consider such an act to be completely out of the question when it came to saving the day.

“I’m not a purist in that respect,” said the director. “I think that if, for instance, he had to kill to protect somebody’s life, he would probably do that, even though that would be hard for him.”

This is Gunn actually doing better than Snyder. From what I hear, Superman doesn’t kill in this movie, and the linked to article mentions the times when Superman has killed. Usually he’s shown being remorseful about it (except the vampire, probably). When he killed alternate universe Zod and friends, he went on a galactic “walkabout” to help himself deal with it. Not mentioned is Superman killing Mxyzptlk after he kills Jimmy Olsen. I don’t like that the imp went full psychotic, but when Superman killed him in Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow, Kal exposed himself to gold kryptonite long enough to permanently strip himself of his powers in penance. So we’re fine here. I just wanted to mention it to show I’m not equating Gunn to Snyder on the same level. Still, there’s the rest of this article, making similar mistakes.

A lot of what’s left will be coming from a Rolling Stone interview by Brian Hiatt. However, one more minor one before the big bomb. We’re slowly getting worse as we go on.

The wrong Supergirl!

I don’t have an image from Tom King’s Supergirl because the less I have to think about his Woman Of Tomorrow story where she goes off on her birthday to get drunk rather than spend time with her cousin and his family the better. Unfortunately, that’s one of Gunn’s other muses when it comes to the Maid Of Might.

People who’ve read the Woman of Tomorrow graphic novel might have reason to be concerned about Krypto in Supergirl. You cut a scene where Ultraman punches Krypto because it upset audiences. If he can’t be punched in this movie, how do you have a scarier thing happen to him in a Supergirl movie?

Remember, this is a different movie than Supergirl. Supergirl is a way more rock & roll film. It’s a little bit rougher, in certain ways. She’s a tougher character. She’s not Superman at all. And so it’s not the same. This movie really is for everybody. And so is Supergirl, but it’s a little bit edgier in some ways than this film. Mind you, I’ve seen all the dailies, but I haven’t seen the cut. I see it next week, I think. So I’m very excited about that.

Wait, there’s something I have to worry about with Krypto in that story? Apparently I haven’t heard all the bad parts. Look, it might be a good story, but this is not the way I want to see Kara portrayed. Since the New 52 I’ve seen too many bad takes on her. In the New 52 she was angry and hated Earth, even getting into a fight with her alternate universe Power Girl self because of it. The Lauren Faust version of DC Super Hero Girls turned her into Rainbow Dash. If she’s going to knock off any of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic “mane six” it should be Fluttershy, though not as shy. Shea Fontana’s series, despite the limited budget for a YouTube series and some Lego and regular spinoff movies, was the last time I saw her done right outside of Scooby-Doo Team-Up.

Kara may not be in my top list but she’s still one of my favorites from my childhood, and seeing her treated this way makes me sad. I might watch his Superman, but the Supergirl movie I’m out on. I hear Gunn’s is even worse, as her cameo makes her a drunken party girl who for some reason is Krypto’s actual owner so he can be in her movie. Read the full interview. He knows about the cat. And the horse and monkey. There’s also this part from earlier in the interview.

I think people want to be reassured that there’s a good explanation for why Supergirl didn’t tell Superman about his parents. Since she’s presumably more knowledgeable about Krypton.

You’re assuming that everybody on Krypton is the same! And how would she know? She’s younger than him, so she wouldn’t know. She wouldn’t know anything about his parents.

She’s his cousin. Some versions have her following him to Earth. One even had her as a teen babysitting Kal-El and thanks to story stuff ended up staying young during her travel to Earth when she was sent to take care of her baby cousin, only to finally arrive after he long since grew up.

Fair enough. Did you ever think about a bigger role for her in this film? Or was it always as we see it in the final cut?

Yeah, it was always that. When I took this job, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow [the graphic novel that inspired 2026’s Supergirl] was, like, number one for me of the things I knew I wanted to do. Ana Nogueira just killed the script right away and saw what I saw in how the comic could be adapted to film, where [Supergirl is] even rougher in the film than she is in the comic, I think.

Again, I don’t want her rougher. I want her sweet and fun loving, struggling to understand life on Earth but ultimately fall in love with the place and you want me to get to the Synder-esque part already, don’t you? Okay, here it is!

The EEEEVIL Parents

Did the original idea for the Jor-El and Lara twist come from your reading of the John Byrne comic run where Krypton was cold and sterile, and Clark embraced Earth over Krypton?

Yeah. Listen, I read that when it came out. I definitely had that in my head. And isn’t it also a little bit in Birthright, too? So I did have the comic background excuse to do it.

Cold and sterile doesn’t explain the message telling their son to conquer the planet, rule without mercy, and turn the women into baby factories to rebuild the Kryptonian race. I’m not happy with Byrne’s take because he wanted to make Krypton a place the galaxy was better off without, which takes away the tragedy of its destruction. If they really wanted to make Superman an immigrant allegory (and again, that’s more Supergirl than Superman), you’d think they would have kept that. Even in the Byrne version, Jor-El and Lara at least die together content in the knowledge that their son (who would be born on Earth thanks to the birthing matrix carrying the embryo instead of the toddler–further ruining the immigration allegory) would survive. I like that moment in their final seconds. I don’t buy the Richard Donner version that he was sent to be a beacon of light for the world, but I also don’t agree with going this far.

Even among people who love the movie, there are some who also have enough of a lingering affection for Krypton and the idea of a benign Jor-El and Lara that they’re hoping that will somehow get retconned or revealed as a double-secret trick or something.

They’re @#$% out of luck!

There’s your Snyder-esque shut down. If you wanted to believe this was a Luthor trick, tough cookies. You get evil parents and like it! You could have even ignored this and said “I’ll let people have what they want, but there’s a reason I need this to be legit for my story, whatever later retcon may or may not do”. Like with Snyder making a story specifically to make Superman kill without the emotion behind it, Gunn defends this version as important to the story he wanted to tell, fans and multiversal continuity be damned.

The problem is, fundamentally, that would undo the entire emotional arc of the movie, right?

That’s right. That’s the whole point of the movie, that Superman thinks he is doing something because it is his destiny and his Kryptonian parents have set him out to do this thing, and along the way he discovers through the love of the people who are actually his parents that he’s doing these things not because of someone else, but because of himself. It’s like taking accountability in the deepest way possible that his morality is not based on some figure outside of himself, but on his own choices. I think it’s really beautiful in that way, and I’m not gonna change that.

And  I don’t really even think of Jor-El and Lara as being totally evil. They just have this mindset that humans are less than what they are. We’re sea turtles to them. They’re just trying to keep the Kryptonian genes alive.

That’s not exactly clearing them of evil. Clark’s only “destiny” was to not get blown up with his parents as they try to save their only child. Not to be a beacon or conqueror, but to not die and hopefully get picked up by parents who would love him as much as they did. Seeing us as lesser beings doesn’t make them good. I’m starting to think I can judge a Superman continuity partially by how Jor-El and Lara are depicted, especially those final moment. Where usually Lara chooses to stay with her husband, Zack decides to kill him off, leaving Lara to see the end of Krypton alone with all the uncertainty he and his screenwriters could force into that scene. He tries to defend this more in an interview with Inverse by Ryan Britt and Hoai-Tran Bui on the twist as they try to defend it as well.

“It’s happened before in the comics,” Gunn tells Inverse about this twist. “It’s few and far between, but it’s happened.”

There are a few comic book inspirations Gunn is referencing here. One is the concept of “Mister Oz,” an alternate version of Jor-El who ends up on Earth before Kal-El and becomes an evil mastermind. The SyFy Channel prequel series Krypton sort of gestured at this idea, as it had a baby version of Jor-El who was adopted by the villain Brainiac, suggesting another alternate story in which Jor-El would be a villain, and perhaps, not even Superman’s father. Meanwhile, the 2022 alternate universe story, Flashpoint Beyond, also revealed that a different version of Jor-El was planning to invade Earth, and create a new home for Kryptonians.

From there we get other evil Kryptonians, which should have no impact on Jor-El and Lara. The Phantom Zone exists in fiction for a reason, a place Kryptonians dump their worst criminals so Superman can fight them in various comics, movies, and shows. (If you want a good Superman video game, something to consider.) I don’t care about Zod or the couple from All-Star Superman (both of which are brought up) or the DCAU, or even the various escapees that showed up on Superfriends. Jor-El and Lara should not be sending their son to conquer the planet. It was one of my issues with Smallville. At least when we got evil Lara in the pages of Superman Adventures it was an alternate universe.

There are a few other examples, and all the examples of an evil Jor-El and/or Lara exist outside of “regular” canon. So as Gunn admits, this is a pretty big swing. Most of us would never have assumed Superman’s birth parents could be so horrible. And yet, Superman’s family is the key to the entire movie.

“I didn’t want to take something away from him that was elemental to who he was, but I did want him to deal with a personal crisis,” Gunn explains, referring to the big twist.

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However, Superman wouldn’t have been able to rally without a pit stop over in Smallville, where Ma and Pa Kent reignite his belief in himself. To Gunn, that sequence was essential for the massive canon change to work.

“I wanted at the heart of this story to be about Superman the human being and him struggling with something about the way he sees himself and his identity crisis,” Gunn says, “and then finding his new faith in himself through that process. So, the easiest way was to change what we expect about the mythology of Superman. But, in a way that doesn’t really hurt him because he still has his foundation in Ma and Pa Kent.”

It wasn’t necessary to go that far. Jor-El and Lara in Byrne’s story die knowing each other’s love on a planet that rejected emotions. Krypton could be a bad place without ruining Clark’s birth parents. It would have been a downer, but not as bad as ruining two characters who have been part of Superman’s backstory since the early years. (not the first story. We wouldn’t meet Krypton for quite a while in the comics.) Gunn didn’t need to evilize his Kryptonian parents in order to make his Earth parents look better, as he also claims.

“I wanted to portray Mom and Pop Kent a little bit differently than they have been in movies or in TV,” Gunn says. “I was excited to write them and make them a part of the story from the beginning. There are plenty of stories in the comics where they’re not passed away, they’re around a lot, so I wanted to include that.”

Essentially, Gunn didn’t set out to change things about Superman’s family just for the sake of being provocative. Instead, Superman’s roots in Smallville are central to understanding the story of the new film. The idea that Jor-El and Lara are a little bit evil may be new, but for Gunn, the new Superman is about rendering the character in a new way, but also not changing things too much.

A “little bit” evil? Conquer the lesser planet and force them to make space babies. Ruining two minor but important and beloved characters doesn’t benefit the Kents, it ruins the Els. Telling the fans to suck it up is a very Zack Snyder thing to do, and I’m not happy about it. Gunn, don’t be Snyder lite. Even if you can’t blame Luthor, blame Zod or something. Read the room and just let someone fix this or at least let the fans keep their headcanon.