The rumor that Rocksteady was working on a Superman game has been debunked.
As reported by GameRant, reported Jason Schreier said bluntly on Twitter: “Rocksteady was never working on a Superman game.”
Rumors of a new Superman game have been persistent for some time. Of course, you may already know that Superman has been recently most visible in the Injustice fighting games, where he has been cast as the villain. He also appears in MultiVersus and Lego DC Super-Villains, and he will be in Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, the game that we know Rocksteady is working on that stars Mr. Red, White, and Blue.
But we had been reporting on Superman getting his own game since 2016. To put that in context, the last game which headlined Superman was Superman Returns, dating from 2005 and made to coincide with the Brandon Routh film. So that rumor was itself over a decade after that game. It has now been 18 years since Clark got the honors.
Now, while Schreier has debunked the rumor that Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League was originally a Superman game, that speculation has to give way to new information. And the new information is David Zaslav talking about the possibility that Warner Bros could make a new Superman game in the future. In fact, he said this last May, a few months after James Gunn revealed the new DC Studios plan.
James Gunn, co-CEO of DC Studios alongside Peter Safran, explained that they are going for a new unified approach for future projects. Now, they will leave the likes of Injustice alone, but the idea is to make new movies, cartoons, shows, and video games, which will share the same actors to do live action and voice acting.
So, just because Rocksteady wasn’t really making a Superman game that turned into Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, does not mean that they couldn’t be assigned to make one in the future. In fact, it’s also possible that Gunn and Safran are just starting to talk to Rocksteady about such a project.
The prospect of Rocksteady making a Superman game does remain an enticing one after all these years. Regardless of the Boy Scout’s track record in the video game world, it would complement Rocksteady’s prior work on the Batman games very well.
And that’s notable, because in their history in DC Comics, it was Batman and Superman (and for a while, Aquaman) that made the company successful, complementing each other’s success. It would also parallel Warner Bros Animation following up their work on Batman: The Animated Series with Superman: The Animated Series.
Hope really does spring eternal that a new Superman game could come in the future, and that fresh eyes and hands could finally stumble into the formula that would make such a project as powerful as a man of steel.