Some people will take offence at my new Superman

I meet Gunn before the gargantuan global push for a film that Warner Bros needs to make hefty millions, maybe a billion. Gunn, who directed Guardians of the Galaxy, is the franchise overlord charged with creating an elaborate interconnecting world for DC Comics that will be able to challenge the Marvel Cinematic Universe. DC’s kingpins are Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman, and Gunn is a director who knows we have superhero fatigue and wants to wake us up again.

“There are three things I don’t ever need to see again in a superhero movie,” says Gunn, an amicable, booming, bullish 58-year-old who gets to the point. “I don’t need to see pearls in a back alley when Batman’s parents are killed. I don’t need to see the radioactive spider biting Spider-Man. And I don’t need to see baby Kal coming from Krypton in a little baby rocket. We have watched a million movies with characters who don’t have their upbringing explained, like when we see Good Night, and Good Luck we don’t need to know the early life of Edward R Murrow to explain how he became a journalist. Who cares?”

Finally, somebody who gets it. Gunn’s film has Superman (David Corenswet) as he looks on the posters from the off — fully formed and stripped for action. He already works at the Daily Planet and dates Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan). The film starts by flinging a bloodied Superman to the ground after a struggle with the minions of Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). Luthor wants to corrupt people’s minds using the internet and start a war to sell some arms.

It’s frankly very 2025 and also bang on two hours long, which comes as sweet relief when the three-hour Avengers: Endgame exists. “My main goal was to make parents spend less on babysitters,” Gunn says, deadpan. “But I’ll always try hard to cut away the fat and I’ve never worked as hard on a film as I did on Superman.”

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And how can Gunn make sure his Superman does not go the way of the recent superhero films that bombed at the box office? “Well, it’s different to how it used to be,” he says. “Up until Iron Man the only superheroes that made money were the big three: Batman, Superman and Spider-Man, plus X-Men. But then visual effects improved, so even though people thought Iron Man was a C-tier superhero, the film looked real. It changed everything and there were a few glory years when Marvel could put out anything and it would make $650 million. But those days are gone. Now it has to be something that really grabs an audience.”

James Gunn, David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan and Nicholas Hoult at a Superman press event last month

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One way to do that is with a ten-minute scene that just features Clark and Lois talking about geopolitics and whether Superman should have stopped a war. It’s exactly how to make a superhero movie to engage adults. “It is definitely the most unusual thing that we put in the movie,” Gunn says. 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.

“Yes, it’s about politics,” Gunn says. “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.

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“But,” Gunn says, laughing and keen to remind me that we are not on Newsnight, “there is also a flying dog in the film who wears a cape.” He is called Krypto. “And come on, Clark has glasses and people don’t know who he is. He can hold up a building. He’s wearing a costume. If I flew around saving people I wouldn’t make myself a costume I had to change into every time. There’s something peculiar about a person who makes a costume. Clark is a peculiar guy.”

So yes, some fans will simply like the film for the huge fights, the sidekicks and Superdog. Plus, the humour, so often missing from Superman films — this Superman is playful: he enjoys his job. Yet the film is coming out during a summer of protests in the US about President Trump’s plans for, and rhetoric about, immigrants, which is jolting given that Superman makes clear that he is a refugee from another place who came to the US.

And before you say, “Superman has gone woke!” this is all in Superman’s lengthy history. Superman was written by men from immigrant families and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees once released a book in Italy titled Superman Was a Refugee Too. Less than ten years ago DC Comics backed World Refugee Day: “The Man of Steel’s story is the ultimate example of a refugee who makes his new home better.” In the edition of Action Comics No 987, Superman saves a group of undocumented workers from a violent racist.

David Corenswet in Superman

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“I mean, Superman is the story of America,” Gunn says. “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.” I ask if he has considered how differently the film might play in say, blue state New York — aka Metropolis — and Kansas, where Kent grew up? “Yes, it plays differently,” Gunn admits. “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. But screw them.”

Before we go on it should be said that Gunn has a history with Trump. In 2018, after Gunn’s public criticisms of the president, which included a sexually vulgar joke and comparisons with Hitler and Putin, the right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich pulled up social media jokes by Gunn about paedophilia and the Holocaust, which led to a social media campaign against him. Gunn apologised, but under pressure Disney, his employer at the time, fired him before further pressure led it to reinstate him — then he went off to join DC.

There is a scene in the new Superman with Luthor’s monkeys trolling away at screens. Was that, I ask Gunn, alluding to what happened to him? “I don’t think so,” he says, grinning. “It’s not really about me, but people in general driven by rage or the bots governments pay for that create all sorts of nonsense.

“This Superman does seem to come at a particular time when people are feeling a loss of hope in other people’s goodness,” Gunn adds. “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.”

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

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I say how in our divided world, if Superman did actually turn up, we would argue against him, shun him, call him a fraud and kick him out. “It’s happening with the movie,” Gunn says. “We posted footage of David with a bunch of kids who were extras on set. Kids love Superman — it’s like when they see Santa. And David is high-fiving them, it was so beautiful, such a cute video. And then I saw people saying, ‘Oh, great, we’ve got a Superman who’s a pussy.’ Are you kidding me? That’s something you’re going to attack? That little kids like this guy and he’s kind?”

He is incredulous about this, almost delirious, which feels like a decent time to raise a topic he might want to skirt away from: the fictional countries of Barovia and Jarhanpur in the film. Barovia, armed to the absolute teeth, ploughs into the rather unfortified Jarhanpur, which appears to be a Middle Eastern state. The Barovians seem to want to kill everyone in sight.

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Which countries, I ask Gunn, does he think viewers will believe are being alluded to here? “Oh, I really don’t know,” he says, quickly. “But when I wrote this the Middle Eastern conflict wasn’t happening. So I tried to do little things 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 defence against the other country. It really is fictional.”

A kid in Jarhanpur calls out for Superman. He knows that help is not coming from other countries on Earth — he needs something divine, something super to save him. When I was growing up I thought, of the big three, Superman was the archetypal American superhero, but Gunn disagrees. His market research showed that people round the globe think of him as far more international. Yes, he has the homespun Americanisms from his boyhood in Kansas, but he remains an alien just like his creators felt they were almost a century ago.

“He is a hero for the world,” Gunn sums up. The question is, how will the world take him?

Superman is in cinemas from Jul 11