Look up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a hackneyed opening line? No – it’s Superman (2025), James Gunn’s new blockbuster, which flew dashingly into cinemas last Friday. The film comes at a precarious time for blockbusters, arriving in a forbidding post-pandemic landscape where superhero movies, still ubiquitous, are no longer the bankable certainties they were a decade ago. If “superhero fatigue” is the phrase du jour when it comes to recent audience attitudes, then Gunn clearly didn’t get the memo.
Superman is as unapologetically comic book-ish as any film in recent memory, and promises much more to come. It heralds a complete overhaul of the DC Comics movie universe, following more than a decade of critically panned, commercially wavering releases, from Man of Steel (2013) through to The Flash (2023). Gunn, best known for directing Marvel’s much-loved Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, took over as co-chair of DC Studios in 2022, and is overseeing the new creative direction of the franchise himself.
On paper, Superman is the kind of film that embodies what is so drab and off-putting about contemporary blockbuster cinema: a reboot of a character we’ve seen adapted ad nauseum. But here’s the thing: it’s really very good. So good, in fact – lively, and sincere, with an unexpected timeliness – that it ought to upend the widespread cynicism surrounding the modern blockbuster and its viability as an artform.
There is often a temptation to conflate blockbuster filmmaking into one homogeneously disappointing entity – a uric canal down which the year’s big releases grimly float. And sure enough, even if we look at just this year’s offerings, there are plenty of lacklustre blockbusters out there: some commercially successful (A Minecraft Movie; How to Train Your Dragon; Mission: Impossible– The Final Reckoning); others less so (Captain America: Brave New World; Snow White). These represent the kind of output that has come to be referred to as “slop”: interchangeable franchise extensions bereft of imagination, ideology or craft. But this is only half the story.
Twenty-twenty-five has been no one’s idea of a banner year for cinema, but this summer has seen the release of several sturdy, worthwhile blockbusters, from Ryan Coogler’s brilliant Sinners, a vampiric period thriller, to the Florence Pugh-fronted Marvel outing Thunderbolts*, and 28 Years Later, a muscular sequel directed by Danny Boyle. Significantly, these films have not only garnered strong reviews but have enjoyed healthy showings at the box office. Superman banked $217m globally across its opening weekend. Sinners made back nearly four times its budget.
Even Jurassic World Rebirth – arguably the best Jurassic film since 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, if that doesn’t sound too much like faint praise – shot past industry predictions and is currently racing up the yearly Top 10 ranking. It’s a relief to know that there is still an audience for well-made mainstream entertainment; that the doom-mongering about cinema’s apocalyptic future is premature.
The rest of the year features a number of prominent blockbusters from real-deal, big-name filmmakers: in August, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio; in November, Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, starring Glen Powell; in December, Avatar: Fire & Ash, directed by James Cameron. It’s entirely possible that we will end 2025 in the rare situation where several of the very best films are also among the most widely seen. The blockbuster, in other words, isn’t dead yet – and it would take more than Kryptonite to kill it.
‘Superman’ is in cinemas now
