James Gunn’s Superman hit theaters last week, raking in $220 million worldwide in its first three days and inspiring countless think pieces, many of which celebrated the film’s embrace of everyday kindness. It’s a warm, two-hour balm for our fraught political, cultural, and economic moment. I wouldn’t describe myself as someone who particularly cares about Superman — or superheroes, really — but I do love a good movie. And Gunn’s film is just that: solid filmmaking with a sense of humor, a touch of heart, and dazzling special effects.
It’s also a welcome departure from the grim, dark-metallic Zack Snyder era of Superman and the broader DCU. But what’s struck me this week is how often Gunn’s Superman is discussed in relation to Man of Steel, while Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, the 2006 attempt to resurrect the character for a new generation, is barely mentioned.
Sure, that film features two people — Kevin Spacey and Singer himself — who are now persona non grata in Hollywood. But it’s still curious how often the movie gets completely overlooked, as though nothing existed between Richard Donner’s (and Richard Lester’s) Superman films of the ’70s and ’80s and Snyder’s hard reboot.
Superman Returns made almost no cultural dent. It arrived two years before Iron Man and the birth of the MCU, a time when comic-book movies hadn’t yet swallowed Hollywood whole. In 2006, it was just a superhero film — and a disappointing one at that — released in the awkward space between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. That may have been the issue: Christopher Nolan made great films that happened to feature superheroes, while Superman Returns was definitively a superhero movie. It wasn’t just haunted by the shadow of Joel Schumacher’s Batman films, but also by its own reverence for Donner’s Superman legacy.
Even the title — Superman Returns — suggests a lack of ambition. It’s basically Superman V, with a different actor in the cape. Christopher Reeve, Henry Cavill, and now David Corenswet have each put their stamp on the character. But Brandon Routh? Most people probably need a second to remember whether he played Superman on the big screen or on the CW. (He did both.) Nice guy! Looked the part! But Routh was always more of a Reeve impression than a character in his own right. That was the central problem: Singer’s deep reverence for the original films kept him from making a Superman movie of his own.
Setting aside his many, many personal failings, Singer did have a distinct style — visible in The Usual Suspects, Apt Pupil, Valkyrie, and the first two X-Men films. But that style never quite fit Superman.
Which is probably why the only thing people really remember about Superman Returns is Kevin Spacey’s Lex Luthor. And yes, Spacey is a terrible, evil person, which might explain why he’s so effective at playing villains. Routh, bless him, simply couldn’t hold his own against the guy who played Kaiser Soze, Buddy Ackerman, Jack Vincennes, and John Doe from Se7en. Spacey was acting in a movie. Routh and Kate Bosworth were acting in a very expensive television movie that Warner Bros. decided to release theatrically.
And yet, I still have a strange fondness for Superman Returns. Like Gunn’s version, it tapped into that old-school baseball, apple pie, and “truth, justice, and the American Way” sentiment. Routh’s Superman was (and is) a likable, puppy-dog of a character. And there’s just enough camp in Singer’s version to deflect serious criticism. It plays like a live-action cartoon, with no real personality and a plot no one remembers. (Luthor’s plan? Use Kryptonian crystals to build a new continent and wipe out the U.S.)
It’s not a movie worth revisiting, exactly. But as we celebrate the triumph of 2025’s Superman, it is a movie whose existence is at least worth remembering.
