Superman Isn’t The Problem

From $9 billion budget cuts under debate in Congress to the Epstein brouhaha, the first full week after July 4th was stuffed to the brim with newsworthy items. But in pockets of the internet, large and small, the only real story was James Gunn’s new Superman movie. Some folks bristled at Gunn’s red carpet sound bite that Superman was obviously an immigrant. Others rolled their eyes at yet another reboot of a franchise long troubled by its central figure’s perfection. Regardless, the online world’s loudest influencers quickly reached consensus. For them, Gunn’s take ranked somewhere between “not good” and terrible.

Nevermind that the movie won over most critics and has a nearly perfect Rotten Tomatoes audience score while grossing more than $125 million its opening weekend. Only their opinions mattered. Their goal was not to enter into a conversation or provide substantial commentary. It was simply to dissuade audiences from seeing the movie, to erode whatever semblance of cultural common ground we have left without even offering a remotely comparable substitute.

Clocking in at 127 minutes, Superman is a modest time commitment by summer blockbuster standards. It’s also a colorful and dynamic spectacle perfect for the moviegoing season–even if it never quite rises to the level of Gunn’s Guardians of The Galaxy films or this summer’s Thunderbolts*. In the legacy media days, seasoned film critics like Siskel and Ebert would spend a six-minute block of time justifying the directions of their thumbs and move on. 

However, wrapping one’s head around the full spectrum of Superman discourse is a heroic undertaking that requires sifting through an onslaught of half-hour YouTube post-mortems from ScreenCrush’s “Best Superman Ever?” to Ben Shapiro’s foregone conclusions. In the time it took me to do a cursory dive into YouTube Superman content, I could have watched the movie five times. Or revisited every MCU entry leading up to the first Avengers. Or read two books. 

Unlike personalities steeped in YouTube slickness, the critics of yore took their role as guides to those who cared to learn more about the movies seriously. For a time, critics had the power to herald underseen and deserving work made outside the Hollywood system. They could also initiate a much-needed contrarian sea change by reassessing a maligned film. Without Pauline Kael’s passionate defense of Bonnie and Clyde in The New Yorker that spawned its second life at the box office after an initial critical drubbing, studios would have had no incentive to hand the reins over to the directors who ushered in the American Film Renaissance of the 1970s. 

During a summer that has seen legacy media in shambles from Anna Wintour’s abdication of Vogue to the defunding of NPR and PBS, it’s easy to celebrate the X Era’s journalistic populism. Yet, it’s even easier to overlook the hazards of simply owning the other side while soothing oneself to the spoken word stylings of the latest TikToker mugging for the camera while buckled up in a Honda. 

Whether in film, literature, or opera, the critic’s calling is to foster conversation and shape culture. In contrast, the role of the influencer masquerading as critic is to convince the audience to opt out of the art entirely, replacing independent thought and broader understanding with virtual discipleship.

Those like Shapiro only put on their film critic hats to gun for cultural zeitgeist movies because proving that Hollywood elite hate our values provides endless red meat and continued notoriety. They resort to antics like setting Barbies on fire or inserting random pop-culture clips into videos—an aesthetic that had already begun to wear thin shortly after Jesse Watters adopted it two decades ago. But, at least Watters makes a good-faith effort. 

Scores of think pieces exist that blame the dearth of local film critics on media consolidation. However, a fundamental aspect of the changing media landscape that commentators often elide is the increasing mergers of film and television studios with news outlets under an enormous corporate umbrella. 

While gregarious and genuinely populist film critics like Joel Siegel and Gene Shalit would grace living room TVs tuned into Good Morning America or Today on Fridays, such personalities have now understandably fallen by the wayside to avoid vested interests. Any film review on NBC is suspect since parent company Comcast owns Universal Studios (the same for ABC/Disney and CBS/ Paramount). A Siegel or Shalit successor would have the power to manipulate the public’s interest in their employers’ own products while denigrating the competition—quality be damned. 

Such poses a particular problem for Shapiro beyond his central role in Superman writer/director Gunn’s initial dismissal from Guardians of the Galaxy III. As the Daily Wire extends its reach into the film and television production landscape, Shapiro’s interest in movies has gone from a quick aside or two on his podcast to a type of epic 21-minute firebomb against films like Superman. He doesn’t champion a high-quality conservative-coded movie like Mel Gibson’s recent Flight Risk that needed a box-office boost or expose his 7.1 million subscribers to a struggling indie that avoids the worst excesses of Sundance wokedom. He “BLOWS UP” Glass Onion and calls Marvel’s She-Hulk “Garbage.” 

Though Daily Wire’s cinematic output is on an inarguable upswing after the box-office success of Am I Racist?, it’s a long way off from competing with Gunn’s DCU. Thus, it’s in the best interests of all involved to demonize competing content and give audiences a nudge to purchase that Daily Wire+ subscription with the money they’d earmarked for Ticket Tuesday and a night on the town.  

Although the problem goes far beyond conservative commentary (the comic book nerd and “James Gunn loves Palestinians” YouTube influencer crowd have proven just as noxious in the case of Superman), the “Party of Ideas” has an outsized cultural responsibility, especially if it wants to remain ascendant. MAHA is all well and good, but fostering intellectual and cultural health is as integral to quality of life as a shift away from seed oils.

The movement’s commentators should privilege debate and intellectual betterment rather than act as purveyors of rage-filled diatribes based on laundry lists of tenuous woke movie moments. If they cannot produce projects to compete with the Hollywood they so loathe, they can at least serve the role of curator by introducing their audiences to the now-peripheral films that have made American and international cinema history so rich.