James Gunn Accused Of A Self-Insert In ‘Superman’ As The Timeless Hero Allegedly Battles Fake News And Online Trolls In The Upcoming DCU Film
Following the news The Man of Steel struggles against mutant monkey Twitter bots from another dimension, it’s being said that Superman will do battle with the fake news in his next movie. This has people wondering if its director and writer, James Gunn, is projecting too much of himself into a story that’s supposed to focus on an all-American Golden Age character.
POTENTIALLY SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS FOLLOW!
According to Film Threat’s Chris Gore, when he appeared on a live stream with “Nerdrotic” Gary Buechler, a fake news campaign will be used by Lex Luthor against Superman to turn public opinion of him negative. Gore, who confirmed through an inside source that attended a test screening the “#Supersh-t” reports were true, says Lex gets ahold of a recording by Jor-El and alters it to make it look like his son has been sent to conquer the world.
To be fair, if this scoop is indeed accurate, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Similar themes were explored on Smallville and in the DCEU, where Superman came to blows with Batman over a “one percent chance” becoming “an absolute certainty.” He also was prophesied as going to the dark side (and Darkseid) in Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
Second, a “fake news” plot device doesn’t sound as bad or cheesy as monkeys trolling social media. There is that, and the fact the “#Supersh-t” monkey jokes only appear briefly – for about 30 seconds, Gore says. Still, we concede Gunn might be overplaying his hand a bit too vividly here.
To begin with, one thing Gunn is known for, and something his fans would argue he does best, is crude and self-aware humor. But increasingly, his humor has gotten so self-aware that it becomes personal. Having lost a job because of the Internet, he made dumb-bro incels the henchman of Circe in Creature Commandos, and he’s returning to that well in Superman.
Technically, trolls who fit that description almost ruined his career (at least, in his eyes). Despite rising to power at DC and Warner Bros., it seems like Gunn can’t let that go. Gore, Buechler, and Cosmic Book News present “#Supersh-t” and the fake news plot device as evidence of Gunn’s mentality and inability to move on.
Beyond that, in what could be attributed to his newfound power at the studio level – and has been by the pundits mentioned – Gunn is taking the spotlight from the character he’s shepherding. At every turn, we’re reminded Superman is a James Gunn film and it has taken him years to get to this point.
Warner has been chasing after Gunn to make a Superman movie for so many years, their request dates before the pandemic and the Biden presidency. He kept turning them down at the time, and not solely because he was busy at Marvel. Gunn thought the endeavor would be too hard. “Back in 2018, I was first offered Superman,” he explained at CinemaCon via Total Film and GamesRadar.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, that seems so cool. I would love to do that. I don’t know if I can. It seems hard. I just don’t know.’ They then said, ‘Well, we also want you to do The Suicide Squad,’ and I went down the easier path, because that was what I knew. It’s a group of ragtag anti-heroes that was rated R instead of PG13, so I did that,” he added.
Still, Gunn mulled it over. “Over the years, I’d think, ‘How was I going to do Superman if I ever had the chance to do it? How can you take a character like this, who’s perceived as old-fashioned by many? There have been so many different permutations of the character throughout the years, so how could you do it for a modern audience?’” he pondered.
Gunn had much the same explanation in the recent look behind the scenes of Superman. His partner at DC Studios, Peter Safran, explains in the same short that Gunn took the job when he finally had “an in” without getting too specific. This might include placing trolls and fake news in opposition to the MOS on top of other familiar tropes Gunn wrote into his film.
“It also has all the fantastic elements that we’ve never really seen in a Superman movie: the flying dog, the giant Kaiju, pocket universes, science and sorcery, and all these things that were in the old Max Fleischer cartoons,” he said.
Maybe we haven’t seen these things in a Superman movie – at least not a live-action one – but each of them has appeared in almost every James Gunn movie of the past ten years. The Guardians trilogy had variations of animals and pets of all kinds. The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker had a kaiju; one of them was Starro.
The ragtag group of heroes is also present and accounted for. Guy Gardner, Mister Terrific, and Hawkgirl form an embryonic League called The Justice Gang. Judging by the name, they won’t have their act together, but if that moniker doesn’t make it clear, Nathan Fillion’s summary of his approach to Guy should.
Speaking with TV Guide, Fillion described Gardner as a selfish jerk who thinks overconfidence is a superpower. “He’s a jerk! What’s important to know is, you don’t have to be good to be a Green Lantern; you just have to be fearless. So Guy Gardner is fearless, and he is not very good,” the actor explained.
“He’s not nice, which is very freeing as an actor because you just think to yourself, what is the most selfish, self-serving thing I can do in this moment? And that’s the answer. That’s what you do in that moment. I think if he has a superpower, it might be his overconfidence, in that he thinks he could take on Superman. He can’t!” Fillion continued.
It’s the same kind of flawed protagonist we got in Star-Lord and Peacemaker, who barely resemble how they were written in the pages of Marvel and DC and Charlton, respectively. The Peacemaker and Star-Lord the public consciousness understands are Gunn’s revamped adaptations.
We might see this occur with Superman himself if the self-insert accusations by Chris Gore, Nerdrotic, and CBN are true, and trolls are enough to bum an omnipotent Kryptonian out. And remember, it’s not just that. Krypto is redesigned after Gunn’s dog, he is the star of CinemaCon and the marketing, and so on.
There’s nothing wrong with that when Gunn has a great track record for blockbuster IPs. However, making himself and his journey the focus is a bold, unorthodox strategy when people want to know more about the story and what the cast brings to their iconic roles. We’ll see if the approach pays off for Gunn, Warner Bros., and DC in July.
