When director James Gunn was offered the chance to direct the next Superman movie, he said no. It’s a surprising admission, but one that requires a little additional context. The offer was made back in 2018, and came with a second option, directing what would become the 2021 sequel to Suicide Squad. Gunn took the latter.

“I thought about Superman, but it just didn’t really speak to me,” Gunn explains of his initial decision to say no to the most famous superhero in comic-book history. “They wanted a new Superman, at a time that was much closer to Zack Snyder’s [2013] movie, and Suicide Squad was an R-rated Guardians of the Galaxy. It was a little bit more familiar and easier for me to sink my teeth into.

“But the idea of Superman stuck with me and I kept thinking about it,” Gunn adds. “It was always there, and it was something like a thought experiment, trying to figure out how would I do it. And eventually it was offered to me again, and then I said yes.”

The result is titled simply Superman, and stars 31-year-old American actor David Corenswet as Superman, known by day as Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent. The film also stars Rachel Brosnahan as reporter Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult as super-villain Lex Luthor, plus Nathan Fillion as Green Lantern, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, Edi Gathegi as Mister Terrific and Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho.

The many adaptations of Superman for both the cinema and television screen have told the Man of Steel’s “origin” story from a specific prism: that the last infant son of the distant planet Krypton was dispatched into space as his home planet disintegrated, and was brought safely to Earth and raised by a childless couple, Smallville farmer Jonathan Kent and his wife, Martha.

Gunn’s film does not change the origin story, but perhaps gently reshapes the emphasis. The 1978 Richard Donner film, which is remembered by many as the definitive Superman film, for example, makes more of Superman’s Kryptonian parents, played by Marlon Brando and Susannah York, than it does Ma and Pa Kent.

Gunn seems as interested in the Kents as he is in Jor-El and Lara, perhaps more. “This is a story about a father’s relationship to his son, and a son’s relationship to his father,” Gunn says. “And I think that Pa Kent’s incredibly important in all of that. Superman comes to Earth, he was not born to Earth but he has an Earthly father. A lot of this is about Pa and Clark and their relationship, and I think it’s a really beautiful thing.”

Because Clark Kent, as he is known, is raised on Earth, Gunn also wants to take time to explore Superman’s humanity, rather than, perhaps, Clark’s relationship with the distant echo of Krypton.

“Superman is an alien, but he doesn’t feel like an alien,” Gunn says. “I think he feels like we do, but he knows on some elemental level he’s completely different from everybody else. And I think that’s the thing he really doesn’t like. I think he hates that. He wants to belong, he wants to be like us.

“And the irony of it all is that [his nemesis] Lex Luthor hates him because he’s different, which is what Lex wants to be,” Gunn adds. “Lex wants to be better than everyone else. Lex wants to be put up on a pedestal. So we’ve got the alien who wants to be human, and the human that wants to be superhuman, and that’s the conflict in the story, at least on the physical level.”

Which brings us to Gunn’s father, James F. Gunn. Gunn senior and his wife, Lee, raised a family in Manchester, Missouri, a suburb on the western outskirts of St Louis. Like Pa Kent, Gunn senior, who died in 2019, never wanted much that he didn’t have already in Manchester, but like Pa Kent he taught his son to look beyond the stars.

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“I owe my dad a lot,” Gunn says. “I think I owe both my parents a lot, but my dad, I went through a hard time as a kid where I didn’t quite fit in. I guess I was having a really hard time, my dad went and talked to a psychologist and the psychologist said, ‘what does your son like? Try and bond with him over things that he likes’.

“So my dad took me to a comic book convention in Chicago, and to this day, it was the greatest weekend of my life,” Gunn says. “I don’t think I’ll ever beat that weekend in terms of how much fun I had, both being with my dad, watching my dad be amazed, buying tons of comic books.

“It was a real validation by my father that what I was interested in was OK,” Gunn adds. “And very different, I think, from other parents who probably thought comic books were stupid stuff and they should be reading something else.”

In fact, the Superman story itself is deeply knitted to the story of fathers and sons, both in the narrative – Jor-El sending his son Kal-El to Earth as Krypton disintegrates – and also behind the scenes. According to creator Jerry Siegel’s daughter, Joanne, the death of her grandfather in a bungled robbery contributed to the blueprint for a bullet-proof hero.

How much losing his own dad reshaped Gunn’s approach to the Superman story is difficult to discern, he says. “I really don’t know. The only way in which I’ve really changed since my dad died, which is sad, is that my dad was the first person I would show everything to that I did.

“That was the reason I kind of did stuff,” Gunn adds. “The reason I wanted to be successful was so I could say, hey dad, look at all this money I made. The whole reason I wanted to make movies was like, dad, look at this. He loved what I did and it was the best reason to make stuff.”

Central to Gunn’s mission was the search for Superman himself, a quest which brought Corenswet, whose credits include We Own This City (2022, for HBO) and Lady in the Lake (2024, for Apple TV+), into the room.

“It’s not so much that he’s a role I’ve always wanted to play, it was that when somebody brought it up as a possibility, I thought, well, sure,” Corenswet says. “I mean, who wouldn’t want to play that? The most iconic, the original superhero.

“If you pass somebody wearing a Superman t-shirt, or you see a Superman flag or somebody has a Superman tattoo, everybody knows that symbol. Even if they’ve never read a comic book and never seen a movie, they know that symbol, and it means something unifying and exciting and hopeful.”

Boot camp for Corenswet, aside from the enormous physical demands of the role, was a reading list that included Superman for All Seasons and All-Star Superman.

The former is a four-issue comic book limited series written by Jeph Loeb and drawn by Tim Sale, published in 1998. It is significant because it is split into four chapters, exploring Superman’s childhood in Smallville, but also his work in Metropolist on the Daily Planet and his rivalry with Lex Luthor.

The latter is a 12-issue comic book series written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely, published between 2005 and 2008, which borrows from Greek mythology. In the series, a dying Superman embarks on a series of final tasks for the people of Earth, dubbed the Twelve Labours of Superman.

Equally intriguing to Corenswet was Christopher Reeve’s performance in the 1978 film adaptation of the comic book, which remains a cultural touchstone.

“There’s a sort of meta-performance that lifts off of the performances that we’ve seen on the big and small screen, great portrayals in television shows throughout the decades ... a sort of amalgam, a platonic Superman that exists in the public consciousness that everybody sort of holds a piece of, and doesn’t really exist anywhere firm,” Corenswet says.

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“But I think the great thing about Superman is that his spirit is so much one of the good and the hopeful that it tends to be that the great contributions … rise up into the firmament and join that canonical ideal of Superman.”

Any missteps along the way, or things that didn’t really resonate with people, tend to be forgiven, he says.

“Even the great Christopher Reeve had moments where you go like, oh, well, that’s kind of silly, or that was … more for kids than it was for adults … it’s not that they’re forgotten, but they’re allowed to fall away and only the good remains,” Corenswet says.

“Maybe that’s just my way of trying to talk myself into believing that if I screw up too badly, it won’t be remembered, and it’ll just be swept under the rug and the next guy can do a better job,” he adds, laughing.