In a 1957 episode of “I Love Lucy,” Superman cracked a joke.
The hero has just rescued the mischievous Lucy (Lucille Ball) from the ledge of her apartment building where she had ended up after dressing up as Superman to entertain the birthday party for her son, Little Ricky. Lucy’s husband, Ricky (Desi Arnaz), starts yelling in heavily accented English before Superman, played by George Reeves, stops him.
“You mean to say that you’ve been married to her for 15 years?” he says, before hitting the punchline: “And they call me Superman!”
That gag is evidence that for as long as Superman has been represented in film and television, writers have been trying to find a way to give him a little edge. In his initial screen representations, Superman was an earnest representation of Americana—despite being from the fictional planet Krypton—and tantamount goodness. But as time has passed, his appearances has been marked by artists and actors wrestling with his godlike nobility and wanting to question his straight-laced nature.
The more you look at the arc of Superman’s appearances on screen, in fact, the more the question becomes: Whom do we want this character to be? Should he be relatable to viewers or exist on a higher plane to represent the best of us all? Should his huge amount of power be comforting or feared? And, perhaps most of all, should he be perceived as cool? Or is he inherently sort of dorky?
Whereas Batman had his tragic back story, making him moody and tortured, and Spider-Man had the youthful verve of a kid from Queens, Superman was always kind of a square. In his simplest form, as in Reeves’s series “Adventures of Superman,” which began airing in 1952, he was a noble crime solver. The opening credits find him standing, hands on his hips, as the announcer declares that he fights for “truth, justice, and the American way.”
Over time, Superman has been transformed into a moody teen and a Christ-figure, a violent threat and a cuddly protector. The most recent high-profile incarnation of the character, played by David Corenswet in James Gunn’s 2025 blockbuster “Superman,” aims for a happy medium, reframing Kal-El’s desire to do good as “punk.” After all, if the world is full of bad guys, maybe being intensely optimistic is the most radical move of all.
Broad shoulders, strong jaw
Superman, the creation of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, was born in 1938’s “Action Comics #1,” and it didn’t take long for Hollywood to get hold of him. He was first rendered with clean lines and broad shoulders in the series of Fleischer Studios cartoons that began with a 1941 short where Superman goes head-to-head with a mad scientist who has imprisoned Lois Lane, performing incredible feats of strength along the way.
The Fleischer films, like the Reeves series that would follow about a decade later, defined the traditional mode of Superman on screen. He was strong-jawed and eminently heroic. You don’t get much of a sense of his inner life. After he saves the day, and his Daily Planet colleagues remark on Superman’s skills, his alter ego Clark Kent gives a sly glance to the camera, letting the audience in on the, quite obvious, ruse.
By the time Superman was headed to the silver screen in the 1970s, audiences were a little more discerning; they wanted some sense that Superman wasn’t a cardboard cutout but a human being—or as human as an alien could be. As such, when Christopher Reeve took on the mantle for the 1978 Richard Donner film, he realized how he could not only put an original spin on Supes, but make him more relatable to audiences.
“Superman,” arriving three years after “Jaws,” was a product of Hollywood’s move toward blockbusters and a sign that the business was aiming for fluff that would make millions of dollars. But Reeve, who went to Juilliard, was trained to think about every role as if he were playing Hamlet. He argued the “Man of Steel” persona as “totally exaggerated,” he told the New York Times. To challenge that, he made Clark Kent a nerd, hunching his shoulders, making him sputter with nervousness.
“There’s some of him in all of us,” Reeve said. “I have a great deal of affection for him—it’s not just that he can’t get the girl, he can’t get the taxi.”
The 1970s were a humanistic era of filmmaking, defined by filmmakers ranging from Martin Scorsese to Hal Ashby, and Reeve chose to locate the human in Superman not through his nervous Clark, but through the genuine tension in his romance with Lois Lane, then played by Margot Kidder.
Goodbye innocence
After Reeve hung up the cape, other versions would follow, using Superman’s love life to find his pathos—among them the television shows “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” and “Smallville,” the latter of which focused on Clark’s hormonal teen years. It was as much in the spirit of “Dawson’s Creek” as it was in the tradition of George Reeves.
Still, as the years progressed, cynicism seemed to cast a pall over Superman. The national innocence had curdled since his introduction, and so the hero himself couldn’t be such an innocent figure. In recent years, before the 2025 movie, Superman has either had two modes: Nearly terrifying in his all-consuming power or laughable. The latter has been handled by cartoons like the 2019 series “Harley Quinn,” which turns Superman into an overly confident dope. The former most embodied by Henry Cavill’s take in the Zack Snyder movies like 2013’s “Man of Steel.”
Superman in those movies is a figure whose unlimited power can be violent. In “Justice League,” first released in 2017 and then in expanded form in 2021, he briefly turns evil. The way this Superman battled preconceived notions of who Superman should be was to remove any warm and cuddly aspects of the figure.
In some ways, it was a Superman for an America that didn’t feel like it needed a Superman, and a movie industry that valued destruction and spectacle over storytelling. The narrative of Snyderverse, as it was known, was as much about trying to battle DC Extended Universe’s corporate enemy, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as it was about Superman’s emotional journey. The way to make Superman cool again was to highlight his brawn.
Optimism to a fault
The Gunn movie takes a different tack, essentially arguing that what makes Superman lame is what actually makes him valuable. Corenswet’s Superman isn’t just dorky when he’s hiding as Clark Kent; being corny is his entire personality as evident in a scene in which Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) teases him over his taste in music. He’s feared, yes, but only by those who believe propaganda that the villains spew. And while he’s physically strong, he’s able to win the day because of his genuine love for others. He even has a cute dog sidekick.
This new “Superman” falls into a genre of science fiction and fantasy known online as “hopepunk,” which gained popularity among some fans under the first Trump administration and was defined by optimism in the face of oppression. The label is fitting in part on a literal level because Gunn ends his movie on Superman’s smiling face with the song “Punkrocker,” which features Iggy Pop crooning, “I’m a punkrocker, yes I am.”
It’s an argument that Superman’s golly gee spirit is his greatest asset, no subversion necessary.
Esther Zuckerman is an entertainment journalist in New York. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.