And guess what? The new guy looks just like Reeve, Cavill, Brandon Routh and Dean Cain -- particularly Cavill, which probably irks him even more.
(I won't say he looks like George Reeves, because that was a different time and George Reeves looked kind of like a cheeseball.)
David Corenswet is this man's name, and you have already seen a picture of him right here in this here post. You might know him from such films as Pearl. I didn't see Pearl, so I know him from such films as Look Both Ways. He's been around for about six years.
He actually looks sort of absurdly like Cavill.
Which is really not what you'd hope for a quarter of the way into the 21st century.
Now I don't believe that we need a Latino Superman or a Vietnamese Superman or an LGBTQ Superman. (Though I think the Supergirl in The Flash might kinda sorta be that last one? Maybe?) I've never felt diversity for diversity's sake was wisest, despite its potential to please particular factions of the viewing audience (while also risking coming across as pandering).
But as long ago as Chris Evans' casting as Captain America, people were asking if having such a blond, corn-fed looking guy playing this ultimate symbol of American heroism was really the way to go.
Superman isn't quite so specifically American, though of course he was raised in Kansas and any depiction of him has historically gone for that sort of thing. And by casting yet another guy who looks like all the other guys who have played Superman, Gunn and DC have shown a total lack of creativity and opened themselves up to accusations of insufficient diversity in their representation.
Look, we all have an idea in our head of what Superman looks like. But does he have to look exactly like that? Here, if you didn't see the Cavill comparison, these photos make it more manifest:
I mean, it's as though Gunn specifically chose Corenswet to attain maximum verisimilitude in the continuity from Cavill. Which is completely unnecessary as this new movie, as far as I understand it, is not specifically supposed to be a part of the DCEU, though Gunn's involvement might suggest otherwise. Maybe DC really just can't quit the DCEU. (I continue to wonder more and more why I was under the impression The Flash was the last DCEU movie.) It's like it's a parlor trick so see how close you can get to casting the absolute perfectest Superman.
Speaking of The Flash, one thing that was cool about it was that we did get to see a different take on the character. In a trope that now feels quite familiar from the recent live-action and animated Spider-Man movies, among others, we do get a brief glimpse of an alternate universe Superman in which Nicolas Cage played the character, with long and flowing hair, as he would have looked in the mid-1990s when Kevin Smith's Superman project Superman Lives, to be directed by Tim Burton, was first being talked about. Even if the device was recycled from other and possibly better movies, I thought it was cool, for once, to get a different Superman.
Twenty-five years after the cancellation of Superman Lives, the character has lived on in many other forms -- or, more correctly, in one form with many minute deviations. And the next deviation is the minutest of all.
Is this really progress?
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