If James Gunn’s “Superman” played like a big, bright act of faith—sincerity as the new punk rock— then his follow-up, “Man Of Tomorrow,” might be a little more complex: a character duel where goodness and ego don’t just clash, they have to share the same room and make it work. And, by Gunn’s own admission, his new DC Studios film won’t just be another Superman story—instead, something more akin to a strange little self-portrait disguised as a cape movie.
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In a recent interview with Variety, Gunn framed “Man Of Tomorrow” not as some louder escalation, but as something more intimate and oddly uncomfortable: Clark and Lex, side by side, forced into the kind of uneasy coexistence comics have teased for decades, but rarely treated as the emotional engine of an entire movie.
“It’s a story of Lex and Clark, and it’s the two of them trying to get along,” he said. “And it maintains, the things about them we like and we hate… not so much we hate about Superman, but a lot more hate about Lex,” he explained, before pivoting into the real point: he wasn’t just fascinated by Lex as a villain. He felt personally tethered to him.
“But listen, I relate to Lex,” Gunn admitted. “Like, it was always, for me, the thing I was always wanting to do was to make more of a Lex movie because I really relate to Lex. “It’s awful, that is to say,” he continued. “I’m not, you know, shooting innocent people, but his sort of ambition and his obsession, you know, his drive.”
Gunn called it “a really weirdly personal film,” essentially admitting that “Man Of Tomorrow” wasn’t merely a Superman story he happened to be directing; it was a movie built out of two competing instincts he recognized inside himself.
“It’s a really weirdly personal film that I’m making because I relate to Lex,” he said. “And I also, in some ways, relate to the naivete of Superman, I relate to this belief in the goodness of human beings, which I do, and [Superman’s] simple Midwestern values, which is where I’m from, and how I look at life.”
“So, they’re both sides of myself,” he continued about the two characters. “And I think that this movie is an expression of that.”
On the practical side, “Man of Tomorrow” is positioned as the next major step in the new DCU-era Superman saga, beyond “Supergirl,” which arrives this summer, with Gunn writing and directing for DC Studios under the broader Warner Bros. umbrella. And, if the gears are turning the way Gunn suggested, the production runway is already in motion: the filmmaker revealed that cameras on the film will begin rolling in April. Listen to the whole conversation below.
