“Every era gets the superhero it deserves, or at least the one filmmakers think we want,” wrote Manohla Dargis in her New York Times review of ‘Superman Returns’ in 2006.

‘Superman’ Director James Gunn made headlines this week, inadvertently kicking a conservative hornet’s nest by suggesting that the superpowered alien refugee who came to the United States illegally in a spaceship to escape from the ecological disaster of his home planet might have a soft spot for immigrants.

“I mean, ‘Superman’ is the story of America,” Gunn said in an interview published last weekend in The Sunday Times. “An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country, but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”

“Yes, it plays differently, but it’s about human kindness and obviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness,” he said. “But screw them.”
If that sounds tone-deaf from an executive (Gunn is also a co-CEO of DC Studios) out on promotional tour touting a $225 million dollar film hoped to relaunch a franchise, and writ large, an entire cinematic universe, then either you are too browbeaten by the culture wars, or you know nothing about who Superman is.

This is what commentator Kelly Anne Conway said on Fox News, “He found himself unable to say Superman’s slogan — ” fighting for truth, justice and the American way.” He said, “truth, justice and all of those good things.” He refused to say “the American way” and he’s playing Superman.”
During the Fox News segment, a chyron on the screen read: “Superwoke.”

“We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology on to us,” said Conway.

Jesse Watters, a Fox News co-host, makes the joke off-camera as the segment ends, “You know what is says on his cape? MS-13.”

Ben Shapiro, Tim Pool and multiple right-wing X accounts like End Wokeness are not waiting to see the movie to make judgements. In a video posted to his YouTube channel, Shapiro accused filmmakers of an “attempt to separate Superman off from America,” alleging Gunn likened the character to an “illegal immigrant.”

Shapiro continued castigating Superman unfavorably to Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, correlating a “deep hatred” for the United States. He noted a social media post Mamdani made years ago giving the middle finger to a statue of Christopher Columbus.
Pool, in his YouTube video, said: “The issue is not, ‘Superman is an immigrant.’ The issue is illegal immigration.”

Conservative sports media Kevin Kietzman told podcast listeners Monday that he would avoid seeing the film “When the studio head is saying that Superman is an immigrant from other places and yes, the movie is about politics —Yeah, you can count me out.”

But this was not an Onion headline. This is just the cultural climate that the latest Superman film is entering. These are the times we live in. In 2025 MAGA backlash over a comic book movie that they haven’t even seen yet is both familiar and dumbfounding.

Superman standing up to bullies? Isn’t that a little out of his lane? When did Superman go woke?
In ‘Superman,’ Clark Kent (David Corenswet) and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) politely argue over who can honestly claim to personify punk. Is it your disposition, the artists in your ITunes library, or is it doing something that nobody else will dare to do? Clark asserts that he is actually punk because empathy and being a good person are punk rock qualities in a vapid and cruel modern world.

Some people are literally angry at Superman for upholding antiquated values they have long abandoned. Whether its gleeful celebration–and hawking of  merch–of an immigration detention camp in the Everglades, the flippant racism of Elon Musk’s AI Grok calling for a new holocaust, the legislation stripping roughly 12 million Americans of health care, or the continued genocide in Gaza playing out in real time for almost two years with the complete acquiescence of the American government, it is difficult to imagine a world where Superman has time to rescue cats from a tree.

In Los Angeles this week we saw ICE descend on MacArthur Park in full tactical gear in an authoritarian show of force. In what became a glorified photo op the only people in the park when the armored cars arrived were children attending a summer day camp. This came on the heels of American policymakers approval of a historic $165 billion boost in funding for DHS to fund 10,000 new ICE agents, detention camps, and more military equipment. So, perhaps American audiences will have immigration in the front of their minds when ‘Superman’ debuts this week.

“Yes, it’s about politics,” said Gunn. “But on another level it’s about morality. Do you never kill no matter what, which is what Superman believes, or do you have some balance, as Lois believes? It’s really about their relationship and the way different opinions on basic moral beliefs can tear two people apart.”
The new film reportedly contains a ten-minute scene of Lois interviewing Clark about Superman’s role in geopolitics and his controversial choice to stop a war. The scene is in some of the trailers.

“This is a Superman film for the age of endless discourse, with the difference being that the people—Clark and Lois—who disagree with each other here are willing to discuss and even, perhaps, learn.”
“This ‘Superman’ does seem to come at a particular time when people are feeling a loss of hope in other people’s goodness. I’m telling a story about a guy who is uniquely good, and that feels needed now because there is a meanness that has emerged due to cultural figures being mean online.”
Gunn laughed and continued, “And I include myself in this. It is ad infinitum, millions of people having tantrums online. How are we supposed to get anywhere as a culture? We don’t know what’s real, and that is a really difficult place for the human brain to be. If I could press a button and make the internet disappear, I’d consider it,” said Gunn.

“And, no, I don’t make films to change the world, but if a few people could just be a bit nicer after this it would make me happy.”

At this point it is worth mentioning that Gunn’s movie doesn’t take place on our planet Earth. The film is the first of a newly rebooted DC Comics shared cinematic universe that contains the fictional comic geography of Metropolis (a long stand-in for New York), Century City, Gotham City. The fictional war in the ‘Superman’ trailers that Clark proudly claims he stopped is between a military superpower and an impoverished neighbor state.

The fictional Barovians are hell-bent on rolling over anyone, or anything, that stands in the path of their fleet of tanks. The Barovian invasion of Jarhanpur looks like a bloodbath is about to happen—cue the John Williams theme music—when Superman intervenes.

In the trailer a young boy stands up a ramshackle Superman symbol on a pole and pleads for help; an army bears down in the distance. His head bowed, the boy is praying for a god (what else can we call him?) to intervene from the skies. The image is heartbreakingly familiar.

Jonathan Dean of The Sunday Times asked Gunn which countries does he think audiences will consciously be reminded of when they see the movie. A loaded question, but one that must be asked.

“Oh, I really don’t know,” said Gunn. “But when I wrote this the Middle Eastern conflict wasn’t happening. So, I tried to do little thing to move it away from that, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the Middle East. It’s an invasion by a much more powerful country run by a despot into a country that’s problematic in terms of its political history but has totally no defense against the other country. It really is fictional.”
Maybe it’s for the best that conservatives are fixated on the immigration angle because the Palestinian symbolism might be more controversial than anything onscreen in a studio film all year.

But controversy isn’t new to Superman.

In Action Comics he renounced his American citizenship$ so his global heroism wouldn’t be construed as American intervention. Check the dates. Writers made this decision for the “Kryptonian snowflake” during the Obama administration.

During World War 2 the cover of Action Comics #58 depicted Superman printing a promotional war bonds poster with a racist Japanese caricature condoning violence. In ‘Superman II’ he essentially roofies Lois Lane with a kiss so powerful that it gives her amnesia allowing their romantic tryst to become a secret. In the nineties he grew a mullet.

Bryan Singer’s 2006 film ‘Superman Returns’ arrived that summer with its own embellished controversy; though no one remembers it now in light of all of the other allegations lodged against Singer.

After making two hugely successful (and queer coded) X-Men films Singer was lured by Warner Bros. to relaunch the Superman franchise.

Given how little romantic chemistry Lois has with Supes in ‘Superman Returns,’ now saddled with both a kid and a fiancé (James Marsden), many speculated that Superman was gay. That cultural anxiety, as I remember it, was more endemic of upholding American norms than anything that occurred textually within the film, which, like most American action movies, predominantly involves homosocial relations. Besides, it wasn’t like Singer put nipples on the batsuit or something.

Ironically, more than a few agitated comments have surfaced this week saying that David Corenswet’s “woke” Superman is no Christopher Reeve. Which brings us to the most politically charged Superman film ever attempted, ‘Superman 4: The Quest for Peace.’

Sunk before its release by a studio facing bankruptcy (a $36 million budget was sliced in half weeks before filming began by Cannon Film Co.) ‘Superman 4’ is remembered for being the death knell of the franchise. Effects sequences were either barely completed by second rate effects houses or abandoned entirely; 45 minutes of the assembly cut were lopped off to save money.

So, technically the studio was going broke before it went woke.

Forgotten in all of the bad press and money lost is the fact that ‘Superman 4′ was actually Reeves’ passionate attempt to meld the political activism he stewarded off-screen with the icon character he would be forever associated with. In the film, after receiving a plea from a child, Superman decided to de-escalate nuclear proliferation by confiscating every nuclear power of their warheads.

“It was really two things that happened on the same day in August in 1985,” said Reeve. “I was narrating a documentary film on a group of 12-year-old schoolchildren who interviewed State Department officials and Russian governmental representatives about the fear of living in the nuclear age. On that same day Samantha Smith died.” Smith was a proto-Greta Thunburg activist who famously wrote to the Soviet Union begging for world peace.

After initially declining the student’s request Superman has a change of heart and announces to the United Nations that as a visitor, he has watched Earthlings destroy their planet and each other in wars that he felt he had no business in. He says that Earth is his home now too, and he cannot watch idly as it destroys itself as Krypton did.

“The story (of ‘Superman 4: The Quest for Peace’) has my own personal attitudes incorporated in it. The things I’d like to communicate to the public through the character.” he said. “The most important among those is my feeling that you can’t look to one hero to solve your problems, and that the really serious problems facing the world will be solved by people uniting.”

I don’t remember Reeve’s bohemian storyline sparking any outrage in 1987, but I could be wrong.

MAGA fundamentalists seem to advocate for a Reagan Era Superman—picking up the fallen flag to reassure the president that America will always get up off the mat and fight on. Quaint? Yes, but also myopic.

The cumulative memory loss regarding Christopher Reeve astounds me. Who’s kissing who with the amnesia roofie here? Do people really think Reeve, a renowned activist even before his horse riding accident, would sign off on the cruelty of Steven Miller, Kristi Noem, and Donald Trump if he were alive today?

In ‘Superman 4’ Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) sees Superman’s peacenik bid as an opportunity to re-arm the global powers and make a fortune. He uses a genetic sample from Superman to create the Nuclear Man; a gold-clad Aryan meta-human born in the sun.

Though cut from the film, Luthor plays the United States against the Russians by telling both sides that their adversaries have foiled the Man of Steel and still have nuclear missiles. His plan crumbles when the Nuclear Man goes rogue and tries to incite World War 3.

After thwarting Lex Luthor’s monster’s attempt to trick the United States and the Soviet Union into obliterating each other with their nuclear arsenals, creating a nuclear winter that only the Nuclear Man could survive, Superman captures and returns Luthor to prison.
Luthor, fearful that the Soviet missiles may rain down at any moment, doesn’t know that Superman has defeated Nuclear Man.

“Is the world going to be vaporized?” Luthor asks Superman.
“No, Luthor,” Superman said. “It’s as it always was. On the brink. With good fighting evil.”
Which, depending on your interpretation, is either the most politically charged thing anyone has ever said in a comic book movie, or simply Reeve, through Superman, admitting that peace isn’t something that the planet is ready for. Yet.

Now that’s punk.