Superman 2025: Reaction to the Trailer

You can follow our posts on Superman at this link, and our posts on the new movie, Superman (2025) at this link.

I was shocked at the reaction to the Superman trailer.  Genuinely blown away by how people have taken to it.

A couple of follow ups:

I didn't realize one of the characters we see is an extreme close-up of Metamorpho, and that's good news.  I knew he was in the film, but *kind of* forgot, given everything else we were seeing.  

There's also glances of a character who is unidentifiable, and rumors abound as to who that is.  And, of course, the kaiju thing, which I suspect isn't going to be seen after the first few minutes.

When I finished my very long post about the release and first reaction to the trailer for Superman (2025), I thought I'd have a long wait between posts.  After all, it seems that after the first trailer, we'd be in a period where new information about the movie will be very carefully released, usually in the form of more trailers, staggered up to the movie's release.  Plus, any press the cast will do.  

But in no way did I anticipate how ready people seemed for mere visuals in a two minute and twenty second trailer.  Stuff that I wasn't sure how it would be received.  

Sure, there's the folks out there grumbling - this is the internet.  But the reaction to the popping bright colors of the suit, to Clark bumbling his way to his desk, to seeing Superman use his powers to save a child from immediate danger, to seeing Superman in trouble...  all stuff that people seemed to like.  People seem to like the way Lois looks and her demeanor.   And, yes, Krypto made people cry.

All day and into the night, on Thursday and Friday, I had to keep verifying I was not filtering BlueSky and Threads with a #Superman lens or something.  That's how much Superman filled my socials.  For the first time in my life, the general public was *pumped* about a white dog in a cape and the implications of a Superdog.  

I mean, people saw that dog for less than a minute, and it was like the idea of Krypto entered the brains of the masses in a single shot - not in a way aimed specifically at kids or intended to make a sueprdog cool.  This dog is a good boy, and a good idea.  That said - to just constantly see Krypto in your scroll is a weird experience.  We've had Krypto!  He had a cartoon in the 00's, he's been on Titans, was featured as the lead in an animated film a couple of years ago and was voiced by Dwayne Johnson.  But the character somehow just never clicked with people.  

But I think... if anyone gets the spirit of the innocent and what makes us love animals, as heavily evidenced by three Guardians of the Galaxy movies, it's Gunn.  And he did more for that character in 30 seconds than DC Comics has done in forty years.

There's something about the promise of a non-Grim'n'Gritty take that suddenly feels novel and fresh to audiences, I think.  That they aren't looking for a vigilante anti-hero who, as Alan Moore might observe, would be all about tactical superiority to his enemies.  Instead, folks are goggling at the idea of Superman as someone who is out there saving kids, and recognizing the world in which people throw coffee cups at you for trying to help.  

Maybe we're all laying in craters in the snow wishing Krypto would take us home.

Gunn has stated that in a single day, this thing got like 250 million views.

In the last post, I talked about the sheer alarm some people seemed to feel seeing Superman actually broken and beaten in the first moments of video.  I had to process the fact that, to many people, the notion that Superman even could be broken and bruised was a revelatory idea.  They'd only seen Superman hurt by Zod in two movies - an anti-Superman - and even that was sort of a draw, physically.  And of course Doomsday, which the public seems to have mentally tagged as the only way in which Superman can be physically harmed.  And no Doomsday was apparent here. 

Look, I am never here to gatekeep.  But I raised my eyebrows a tad at the sheer disbelief people shared online, and that surprise was real and palpable.  And generated the effect Gunn intended.  I think folks who pay attention to superheroes, and Superman in particular, kind of nod sagely at Gunn's savvy move of *starting* with the battered and beaten Superman vis-a-vis the usual cultural conversations about why Superman is boring.

And it's been fun seeing the longtime Superman fans come out of the woodwork, along with people publicly reconsidering their stance on Superman, and people who don't know or care about Superman - at least until they saw Krypto.

If what people want to do is create fan-art and buy up Krypto merch on eBay, excellent.  Dig in to some comics.  Look at old cartoons.  Cosplay.  Buy the t-shirt.  One of us!  One of us!

I think, rightfully, some people are a wee bit concerned about the sheer volume of what we saw.  And, I've had my own thoughts about the sheer number of characters.  For us veterans, it's less of a barrier, but fitting in Green Lanterns, Thanagarians, Metamorphos, Smallville, The Daily Planet, Krypto... it's a lot.  That said, if you think about the Guardians movies and Suicide Squad - and now Creature Commandos - Gunn excels at team dynamics and how characters reflect each other.  Many of us get - Guy Gardner talking to Superman is going to be a ride.

Much as when people read All Star Superman when it came out and were marveling at that version of Superman, which was really just a Silver Age version of Superman in a modern context, it's an absolute delight to see the reaction to a Superman whose spirit seems in-line with the comics I pick up every month.  And to see the conventional wisdom of "what you need to do with Superman" thrown in the bin, while a Lois Lane who seems like a tough-girl reporter swaggers about, Superman punches monsters in Metropolis, and a superdog zip about seems to have actually been the key all along.

In press, Gunn is stating 

I believe in the goodness of human beings, and I believe that most people in this country, despite their ideological beliefs, their politics, are doing their best to get by and be good people — despite what it may seem like to the other side, no matter what that other side might be. This movie is about that. It’s about the basic kindness of human beings, and that it can be seen as uncool and under siege [by] some of the darker voices are some of the louder voices.

And that is something Warner Bros has, until this moment, fought and wrestled with every step of the way since the 1980's.  They simply couldn't wrap their heads around any notions that didn't fit certain ideas of toughness and kicking ass - believing certain traits had to be applied to the character and in what an action movie should be.  

Maybe a decade-plus of Steve Rogers as a wildly popular cultural figure convinced WB that sometimes we love a square, and not every action protagonist needs to be an edgelord.  And, in fact, doing the opposite of worrying about cool can horseshoe back and be the coolest thing possible.  It's what I've liked about Superman since coming to the character late as a comics reader when a few key comics unlocked the character for me.

If the internet of the past week is any indication, it sure feels like audiences are ready for a story about a superhero just doing the right thing because it is the right thing again.

When we get Batman and Wonder Woman to show up, it's just going to be all the better as a way to show all three of them are necessary.