Zack Snyder, the director of the much anticipated Man of Steel due to be released this June, recently made some comments about the superiority of DC heroes compared to the heroes of the Marvel universe. Snyder argues that DC heroes occupy a higher strata than Marvel's heroes, who are a rather flashy group that while fun, are in a large way just spectacle. Snyder says that DC heroes are better at being purely archetypal and aren't cheaply interchangeable. While those types of comments are surely inflammatory, it seems clear that Snyder is the right kind of fan to be behind this next Superman.
The fact is is that Superman is the king of the Superhero Movie. Superman wasn't only the first superhero movie, it was superhero movies, not just defining the genre but embodying it. It spawned four sequels (Superman Returns being a sort of quasi Superman V), and even though most people think Superman II was the last good Superman movie, the film series still stand as the foundation of superhero flicks.
In Superman's absence, we saw the rise of Batman in several forms and the large surge of Marvel heroes. Batman movies did something in making a superhero grounded and gritty in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy that no one else has done; In a lot of ways Batman has been set apart from all other superheroes, even those, like Superman, who are apart of the DC universe. As Batman has been set apart, Superman may have been set above. He's a standard, and something hard to grasp, a difficulty we all saw when Bryan Singer, so celebrated at his work with X-Men films, tried his hand at Superman Returns. Zack Snyder has set out to reclaim Superman with Man of Steel, adapting him for the 21st century, but ensuring he's back to claim what is his. He is king of the superhero movie, and while I'm sure he'd be happy with how Tony Stark and his Avenger pals have taken care of it for him in his absence, the king is back and has come to reclaim his genre.
Let's see if he's again ready to rule.
Also there's this:
There is no Kryptonite in the new Superman flick, which excites me because that eliminates the single 1-dimensional weakness of previous Supermen and opens up new exciting possibilities for vulnerabilities. I talked with a friend who thinks a single weakness of kryptonite is lame, and he was then worried that eliminating it was a bad thing. While I don't know what they're going to do in the place of kryptonite, I'm excited to find out, and I think the omission is a good thing. Here with a good breakdown is IGN News:
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