DC Studios shared the announcement trailer for their 2025 film, Superman. Along the way, we also got our first look at the next video game Superman.
As a refresher, James Gunn revealed in early 2023 that DC Studios was planning to create a media mix for their next iteration of Warner Bros. superhero universe. In his words:
“…the DCU is connected, in film, television, gaming, and animation. That the characters are consistent, played by the same actors, and it works within one story. And if something is outside of that, like Matt Reeves’ Batman, or Todd Phillips’ Joker, or Teen Titans Go, that it is clearly labeled as DC Elseworlds, outside of the mainstream DCU continuity.”
While DC Studios have yet to reveal any video games, it’s almost certain that the Superman movie, previously named Superman: Legacy, will lead to a Superman video game. While it’s no longer popular to make a game to be released in the same time as a film or series, because of the logistical difficulty, the possibility of it happening is at least higher than 0 %.
While James Gunn and Peter Safran are heads of DC Studios, and therefore producers on this film, Gunn is also writing and directing this one in particular. Work on this Superman film began in August 2022, literally months before Warner Bros. decided to put Gunn in charge of the whole universe. The trailer just revealed it will be releasing in July 11, 2025, as the first movie in DC Studios’ 1st chapter, Gods and Monsters.
The trailer starts off in a way that genuinely surprised fans; as we see the Man of Steel crumpled in the snow, blood flowing through his mouth. It’s a moment that sets this new Superman’s tone to be distinctly different from the one set by Zack Snyder in his DC movies, with Superman being played by Henry Cavill.
And we’ll focus on that, as it also suggests that Gunn has come up with a way to make a Superman that we can play in video games that makes sense. Superman has conceptually been difficult for video game developers to make games around. Classic titles, like the 1978 Atari 2600 game, absolutely fail to recreate the notion of a superpowered alien, whose weaknesses aren’t physical as much as they are human.
The Injustice video games by NetherRealm Studios had a clever way around this, by having this version of Superman be vulnerable to magic. But truthfully, Boy Scout has long ceded his potential position as the most powerful being in his universe, and he isn’t even the most powerful metahuman on Earth.
If this Superman movie can deliver on the premise of a superpowered character who can still lose to more powerful beings, that’s a Superman that can be used in a video game. We didn’t really need a rhetorical device to accept that, if someone could convincingly tell this story. And James Gunn might just have been the man of tomorrow that we had been waiting for this whole time.
You can watch the Superman trailer below.
