Superman Review: David Corenswet Is Comics’ Golden Boy in a Promising DCU Start

Ten years after Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel first put a brooding Superman on screen, James Gunn’s DC Universe finally gives us the version comic readers have wanted all along: an alien who could crush a tank with one hand and chooses, every single time, to be kind instead. Superman opened in theaters on July 11, 2025, and its own marketing spent months promising a “golden boy” take on the character. It delivers on that promise almost completely.

Set three years into Clark Kent’s career as Superman, the film drops us straight into the middle of an international incident: Superman has just unilaterally stopped the fictional nation of Boravia from invading its neighbor Jarhanpur, and billionaire Lex Luthor is more than happy to use that as the opening move in a campaign to destroy Superman’s reputation for good. Here’s the full breakdown across our five categories (2 points maximum each).

Superman Story – 1.5/2

Good Points: A Real Comic Book Plot, No Origin Retread

Skipping the Origin Story
Gunn makes the single smartest structural decision available to him: he skips the krypton-exploding, Kansas-farm-growing-up origin entirely and starts with a Superman who’s already been active for three years. Lex Luthor’s actual plan turns out to be far more interesting than a simple “destroy Superman” scheme. He funds Boravia’s invasion of Jarhanpur specifically to bait Superman into intervening, then leaks a corrupted fragment of Superman’s parents’ Kryptonian message that appears to order him to “conquer Earth and make it the new Krypton.” It’s a genuinely clever, comic-accurate way to turn public opinion against a hero without a single punch being thrown.

Ultraman and the Pocket Universe
The back half escalates into Lex unveiling Ultraman, a cloned copy of Superman himself, less intelligent but nearly as strong, built to publicly humiliate and eventually replace him. The reveal that Superman is fighting his own clone inside a collapsing pocket dimension is a legitimately great comic book beat, and Krypto and Mister Terrific both get real, story-relevant moments in the finale instead of standing around as spectators.

Where It Falls Short
Because the film spends real time re-establishing who Superman is, what the press thinks of him, and how Metropolis feels about “meta-humans” in general, the first act can feel like it’s covering ground that anyone who already knows seventy years of Superman lore doesn’t need retold. It’s a smart choice for a general audience walking in cold, but longtime fans may find the setup drags slightly before Lex’s actual scheme kicks into gear.

Superman Cast – 1.5/2

Good Points: Corenswet, Brosnahan, and a Genuinely Petty Lex

The Golden Boy
David Corenswet is, simply, the best live-action Superman we’ve gotten in decades. He plays Clark as earnest without ever being naive, a genuine golden boy who gets visibly hurt when the public turns on him, and it’s exactly the comic-accurate read on the character that the role has needed since the Christopher Reeve era. Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane is his equal in every scene, sharp, skeptical of him professionally while still loving him personally, and their interrogation-scene chemistry early in the film is one of its best sequences.

Hoult’s Luthor and the Justice Gang
Nicholas Hoult plays Lex Luthor as a billionaire whose hatred of Superman is deeply, embarrassingly personal rather than some grand ideological stance, and it’s one of the more memorable live-action versions of the character. Around them, Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner is a scene-stealing jerk in exactly the right way, and Edi Gathegi’s dry, quietly heroic Mister Terrific comes close to running away with the whole movie.

Where It Falls Short
With a cast this large, a few of the supporting players around the edges of the ensemble, particularly some of the Boravia-side political figures and Lex’s inner circle, don’t get much beyond a costume and a line or two before disappearing from the plot. They’re not actively bad so much as forgettable, which is still a step down from a main cast this strong.

Superman World – 2/2

Good Points: A Bright, Comic-Accurate Metropolis

Metropolis, Not Gotham
After a decade of desaturated, rain-soaked DC movies, Gunn’s Metropolis is a genuine shock in the best way: saturated colors, a skyline that actually looks like a comic book splash page, and a Daily Planet newsroom that feels lived-in rather than sterile. The Fortress of Solitude, Lex’s private pocket-dimension prison, and the alien technology scattered throughout all look like they were pulled directly off a page rather than redesigned to feel “grounded.”

Krypto and Practical Texture
Krypto the Superdog deserves his own mention here. He’s a fully CG character who somehow feels more textured and physically present than most of the film’s human sets, chewing furniture and ignoring commands in a way that makes the Fortress of Solitude feel like an actual home instead of a set piece. It’s the strongest, most consistent world-building the DCU has managed so far, and it earns the full score.

Music Score and Effects – 1.5/2

Composers John Murphy and David Fleming faced an almost impossible task: following John Williams’ 1978 Superman theme, one of the most recognizable pieces of film music ever written. Rather than avoid it, they lean directly into it, weaving Williams’ original fanfare into a new score at the moments that matter most, most notably the first time Superman actually saves someone on screen. It’s a genuinely emotional needle-drop that earns every bit of the goodwill it’s clearly chasing.

The visual effects work is similarly strong for the quieter moments, flight, heat vision, and Krypto’s fur and physicality all look great, but the climactic pocket-dimension battle against Ultraman leans hard into busy, CG-heavy spectacle that’s harder to parse than the film’s more grounded set pieces. It’s a good score and largely good effects work, just not quite a flawless one.

Originality – 1.5/2

How It Stands Apart / Uniqueness

Choosing to open on an already-established Superman, rather than another retelling of Krypton’s destruction, is a genuinely original swing for a modern superhero franchise reboot, and the geopolitical Boravia/Jarhanpur framing gives the film’s central conflict a sharper, more topical edge than most capes-and-tights blockbusters bother with. Tonally, it’s also a clean break from a decade of grim, self-serious DC movies, choosing sincerity over cynicism at every opportunity.

Where it loses ground is that the actual plot mechanics, a villain manufacturing a war to discredit the hero, an evil clone built as a replacement, a super-team assembling for a final battle, are all comic book and blockbuster staples audiences have seen many times before. Superman is more original in tone and framing than in its underlying plot shape, which keeps it just short of the full score.

What’s Next for the DCU?

Superman is officially the first chapter of Gunn’s “Gods and Monsters” era, and the DCU has already kept moving since it opened. Supergirl arrived in theaters on June 26, 2026, with Milly Alcock as Kara Zor-El crossing paths with Superman and Krypto directly, and Nathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner has since carried over into Lanterns, the HBO Max series currently airing its first season alongside Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart, with the finale set for October 4, 2026.

Clayface, a smaller, horror-tinged DCU entry, arrives on October 23, 2026, before the story comes back around to Metropolis. Man of Tomorrow, Gunn’s direct Superman sequel, is set for July 9, 2027, with David Corenswet and Nicholas Hoult both returning, this time forced into an uneasy alliance against Brainiac. If Superman was about proving this hero could work again, Man of Tomorrow sounds like the point where the DCU stops introducing pieces and starts paying them off.

Gamersuniverse Score:

8 out of 10 stars⭐

Superman nails the one thing it absolutely had to get right: David Corenswet is the comic-accurate, genuinely golden-boy Superman that fans have wanted for decades, and Gunn’s bright, sincere Metropolis is the strongest world-building the DCU has produced so far. Lex Luthor’s scheme is clever, the Justice Gang and Krypto steal scenes without stealing focus, and John Murphy and David Fleming’s use of the classic Williams theme lands exactly when it needs to.

It loses a little ground with an opening act that can feel like it’s re-explaining a character longtime fans already know, a handful of side characters who fade into the background, and a plot shape that, for all its comic-book confidence, still follows a familiar blockbuster formula. None of that stops it from being an amazing start to this new DCU, and one of the best pure Superman movies ever made.

Score Summary

• Story: 1.5/2
• Cast: 1.5/2
• World: 2/2
• Music Score and Effects: 1.5/2
• Originality: 1.5/2
  Total: 8/10

Have you seen Superman yet? Is David Corenswet your favorite live-action Superman? Let us know in the comments.

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Pictures: Warner Bros. Pictures, HBO Max, DC Studios