James Gunn’s Superman Doesn’t Fly—It Falls Flat James Gunn’s Superman isn’t a parable—it’s a lecture, and audiences aren’t buying tickets to be scolded by a Hollywood director who thinks he’s smarter than they are. By Stephen Soukup
https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/12/superman/
The good news for Warner Bros./DC Studios is that its new Superman movie is quickly becoming a cultural touchstone, the standard by which all future superhero movies will be judged. The bad news is that it’s the low-end benchmark, representing the absolute worst that a superhero movie can be while not going straight to streaming. Director James Gunn is suddenly the Mario Mendoza of action filmmaking, and his Superman denotes the Mendoza Line, the trough of superhero futility. Or, as political commentator Ben Domenech put it, “This movie absolutely, totally sucks. The CGI sucks. The writing sucks. The cast, which is, for the most part, much higher quality than the material, sucks…. I’ve seen a lot of superhero movies, and this one—given the level of investment involved, the promotional push, the iconic nature of the character, and the importance to the future of DC and Warner Bros.—is by far the worst.”
That’s unfortunate, but it’s not exactly surprising. Gunn had been dropping hints for some time that he was worried the movie would be poorly received and would tank as a result, possibly taking DC Studios down with it. A couple of weeks ago, Gunn, apparently fearing that his Superman would be ignored, did what any self-important movie director would do in such circumstances: he decided to gin up some controversy by insulting his audience. Any publicity is good publicity in the film business, after all, and so Gunn went full “Hollywood liberal,” telling The Times of London that “Yes, [Superman is] about politics.” Moreover, he continued, it’s about politics that are likely to ruffle some feathers in the nation’s culturally and politically conservative heartland. “Superman is the story of America—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.” Ah, yes. There you have it. Caring about national borders or wanting immigration law enforced makes one unkind—or even inhuman. Take that, Trumpers and ICE!
Conservatives are likely to gloat about the results of Gunn’s publicity stunt. “Go woke, go broke,” many will chortle at the movie’s failure. If the guy had focused more on making a good film and less on injecting politics into it and abusing his customers, he might have created something that didn’t “absolutely, totally suck.”
In many ways, I share these sentiments. I’ve spent the last decade of my life urging business leaders and investors not to damage their companies (or the companies in which they invest) and minimize their profits by “getting political,” by focusing on political matters that are largely unrelated to their operations. Generally speaking, politics and business don’t mix. Corporate executives, investment managers, and others involved in keeping the American economy running have legal and moral responsibilities to their shareholders, clients, etc., almost none of which have anything to do with pontificating on the issues of the day.
All of that notwithstanding, movies are different. Entertainment in general is different. They’re not supposed to be political per se, but they are intended to carry and convey a message. They are intended to teach lessons and communicate ideas. That’s their whole purpose in society.
As I have noted elsewhere countless times before, since the dawn of time, man has told stories. Since the start of recorded history, man has written and told fables. Fables, along with parables, are stories that teach moral lessons. They are the means by which children are taught what matters in a civilization. They are the means, in short, by which the values of a civilization are transmitted from one generation to the next.
Jesus and Cicero didn’t tell parables because they liked to see people’s reactions or hear their laughter. Aesop didn’t tell fables because they made him feel good about himself. All of these people—and countless others—told these tales and pushed these morals because they mattered, because this was, is, and will always be the best means by which to inculcate every generation with the ideas, beliefs, and norms that matter to a society. As Aristotle and C.S. Lewis remind us, the little human animal must be taught the virtues that are important to a society. For if he is not, he will not develop those virtues, and he will never understand, much less enjoy, the good life.
Nearly forty years ago now, Claes Ryn, the erudite professor of politics and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University of America, published an article titled “The Humanities and Moral Reality,” in which he made the case that this type of storytelling, this means of teaching virtue, is the most important of all acts in the preservation of a civilization. Ryn argued that the most important warriors in our fight to preserve our society and our civilization are the people who “draw us into their way of experiencing the world,” the nation’s artists, authors, entertainers, and advertisers. He explained that an individual’s view of the world is shaped to an enormous degree by the artistic symbols to which he or she is exposed. Some symbols strengthen character and imagination, and in doing so, promote a keener sense of reality. Others, by contrast, destroy character and weaken an individual’s ability to reason.
Ryn did not offer specific examples of the enormous social and ultimately political power of literature and the arts, but such examples abound in world history. Obvious ones include the Old Testament stories of Abraham, Ruth, Esther, Job, Jacob, David, Noah, and, of course, Adam and Eve, which have profoundly shaped the very nature of Western society. Erasmus’s great satire, Praise of Folly, did as much to erode respect for the local hierarchy in the medieval church as did Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. Shakespeare and Milton changed the way the world thinks about conflict, love, honor, and God. Voltaire and Rousseau can take as much responsibility for the French Revolution, which changed the Western world forever, as the actions of Louis XVI or Marie Antoinette.
In more recent times, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes to mind. It had as much impact on the debate over slavery and probably influenced the resort to war more than all of the debates in Congress combined. Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle had an enormous impact on the way millions of Americans viewed both the American labor movement and the early liberal agenda. Leon Uris’s Exodus affected the attitude of untold Christian Americans toward the new state of Israel. And many of the most vociferous opponents of the death penalty still cite Camus’ Reflections on the Guillotine as having changed their lives.
The point here is that stories—in spoken, written, or visual form—are supposed to convey messages to their audiences. They’re supposed to teach us.
The problem with James Gunn and his movie isn’t that he “got political” or tried to make a moral point to his audience. The problem is that the point he tried to make, the moral he wanted to teach, is stupid and contemptuous. Kal-El isn’t an immigrant. He just isn’t. He’s a fictional character whose home planet blew up and whose parents died. Moreover, he is raised to be a good and decent man—as well as a good and decent superhero—by the very type of rural heartlanders whom Gunn thinks need to be taught about “human kindness.” Gunn doesn’t tell the story of Superman and Superman’s beliefs. He uses the story of Superman to convey James Gunn’s beliefs, to tell us what he believes and what he thinks is important. And for the most part, we don’t care. As the political writer and podcaster Stephen L. Miller noted, “The reason Hollywood can’t get Superman right is Superman is about what’s good about America, and Hollywood hates America.”
That sums it up nicely. Movies are for telling stories and sharing ideas and beliefs. The problem with this movie is that the ideas and beliefs its director wants to share are trite, tired, and largely rejected by the majority of his audience.
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