Argylle might not be doing any favors for director Matthew Vaughn or its star Henry Cavill as far as their box office reputations go. Similarly, neither has anything to do with the DCU or Superman despite their past ambitions, but Vaughn thinks he knows how he would turn those fortunes around.
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“I thought Red Son was one of the cleverest comics I’d ever read, and the current world we’re living in, it’s certainly become a lot more relevant because ignorance causes more issues, and I think the more we learn about Russia and the Russian history,” Vaughn said.
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Moreover, he wants Cavill to be part of it. “Wow, could you imagine remaking Red Son with Henry Cavill? That would be an interesting movie,” he mused.
The tale revolves around Kal-El’s crash landing in the USSR rather than Kansas and growing up to become a “Champion of the common worker,” before taking control of the empire. It was adapted once already into an animated film in 2020 and lifted from liberally for a subplot in The CW’s Supergirl series.
Kong: Skull Island director first pitched Warner Bros. on the idea of a live-action version of Red Son in 2017, but they turned him down. They’d probably do the same to Vaughn, especially if Henry Cavill is brought up, although the hierarchy has changed in the past year.
James Gunn and Peter Safran run things and they are openly developing Elseworlds concepts for features. One is a Black Superman project handed down from the last regime that will surely please no one. The conventional wisdom, however, is Cavill is too much of a stumbling block for Warners, and if they wanted him around, they would have kept him under contract.
Reportedly, he had a meeting with Gunn where he was offered a different, undisclosed part that wasn’t the Man of Steel. He didn’t go for it and that is where his relationship with WB and DC officially ended, leading to a somber social media retraction of return news he shared coming off Black Adam.