Heavy spoilers for Superman (2025) follow. Be warned!
The moment Lex Luthor called Superman a groomer is when I knew James Gunn’s Superman was going to be a really good movie.
Let’s get the “review” out of the way first: Superman is probably not for everyone. Its 129 minutes are crammed full of decades-old comic book references (which I love) and far too many characters to reasonably develop in that runtime (which I don't). That leads to some undeniably hokey dialogue and rapid-fire exposition dumps, as the entire supporting cast Explains Their Whole Thing To You one by one. For me, the most painful moment was seeing The Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría), a character from The Authority I adore who replaced her own blood with nanomachines, forced to hurriedly deliver a handwaved origin story about giving up her humanity to destroy Superman. If that sounds like a bad time, perhaps emblematic of a recurring issue with modern superhero movies, believe me, I get it.
But there’s also a pretty tremendous story in here about the Man of Steel — the first “super hero” and a character who is often written off, even by comic book fans, as inherently dull in the modern era. I don’t buy that, and thankfully, neither does James Gunn, who responds to the age-old “Superman is boring because he always wins” line by pushing the extremely-loud-incorrect-buzzer several times before the title drop. David Corenswet gets his shit absolutely kicked in multiple times throughout this flick, and every time, it underscores how high the stakes are. You'll believe a Superman can die!
As satisfying as I found Gunn’s take on Superman himself, his Lex Luthor — portrayed with aplomb by Nicholas Hoult — is the real crown jewel of Superman. Introduced while manically masterminding the “Hammer of Borovia” hoax, Hoult’s Luthor is the perfect supervillain for the 2020s: a sneering conspiracy savant who would destroy the universe just to prove he knew how.
After stealing a recording of Superman’s parents from the Fortress of Solitude, Lex releases the translated footage to the public including a final section Clark himself has never heard. Far from being altruistic scientists, these versions of Jor-El and Lara are the kind of Kryptonian fascists Christopher Reeve fought in Superman II. For them, a planet where Kal-El could “do the most good” meant one where he could use his biology to install himself as a super-dictator, enslaving Earth to the Last Son of Krypton. (As an aside, this is probably the most controversial direction Gunn takes in Superman, making Jor-El and Lara effectively equivalent to Bar-El and Lilo, their broken-mirror analogues from All-Star Superman, but it’s a divergence from comics canon I’m willing to accept in service of the movie’s core message — that a person’s bloodline defines them far less than their choices in life.)
With the truth about Krypton society exposed, Superman can’t possibly be the hero he claims to be, Luthor tells Tucker Carlson proxy Cleavis Thornwaite (Michael Ian Black): “Superman was sent here to groom us!”
This line, and the subsequent running joke of “Superman’s secret harem,” is funny because the audience knows it to be absurd — Midwest heartthrob Clark Kent is, of course, way too vanilla to even try polyamory. But the gag is also a blunt reference to the moral panics that have consumed U.S. culture over the course of the last decade, as QAnon conspiracy theories like Pizzagate became part of the Republican Party’s everyday propaganda and trans people are smeared as a pack of sexual predators (and lately, domestic terrorists) instead of a collectively abused minority group.
As I’ve written (repeatedly) in the past, the “groomer” panic is white supremacy passed off as concern for children’s safety, largely pushed by white Christian nationalists whose mission is to make as many white Christian babies as possible. The same people who accuse trans people of grooming children into being trans for sex will readily abuse their own children for not performing straightness or their assigned gender well enough, or for failing to be sufficiently God-fearing, or for resisting a family member’s attempts to assault them. But trans people are strange, you see — alien, even — so it’s easy for mob mentality to take hold against The Other, even when that “other” is literally Superman.
If anyone is a groomer in Superman (besides Jor-El and Lara, who tried to groom their child into a despot from beyond the grave), it’s Luthor — an actual serial abuser, as we see in his treatment of Eve, his LuthorCorp staff, and a blogger ex-girlfriend who he abducts into his extrauniversal detention center. Lex is the ideal hypocrite to deliver the “groomer” smear; a man who idly wants to commit genocide as a means to another end, and perhaps establish his own kingdom on the bones if he has time afterward, is obviously unconcerned with matters like sexual ethics or women’s rights.
Superman isn’t a “trans allegory” per se, but it is pointing the Wayne's World “Get-a-Load of This Guy Cam" at assholes who say Lex Luthor shit about queer and trans people in real life. In laying out his thesis about power, oligarchs, and propaganda, Gunn draws on language that’s currently being used by some of the worst people in modern history to convince the average person that some other, weirder person is their real enemy. That claim is a lie, and Gunn knows it. For all Luthor’s griping, Superman’s presence does nothing to diminish or threaten anyone but people like Luthor himself. (Mali, the falafel vendor and number-one Superman fan played by Dinesh Thyagarajan, proves this to be true, so Luthor happily shoots him in the head, with his only regret being that Mali and Superman didn’t suffer more in the process.) In fact, it’s Luthor who diminishes humanity every day by hoarding untold wealth and resources for his own destructive, self-serving projects.
What Luthor cares about is extinguishing hope by any means necessary, so everyone else can learn their proper place under him. Most importantly, that goal is not treated as a “distraction” (like attacks on trans people so often are) — it’s the whole point. Much of the film revolves around ferreting out Luthor’s plan for the Borovia/Jarhanpur war, and we assume that he’s trying to get richer and increase his global power. Only in the final act does Luthor admit that he engineered the invasion, and everything else, solely as a plan to kill Superman and be acquitted in the court of public opinion. The Jarhanpurian genocide plan wasn’t a “distraction” either, but it was only one facet of the scheme. For Luthor, extinguishing all hope for a better, safer world is its own reward.
Sound like anyone else you know?
The antidote to all of this, Gunn posits, is investigative journalism (more evidence this film was made specifically with me in mind). After it’s confirmed that Lex is behind the Hammer of Borovia, we cut to the Daily Planet for the first time as Clark clocks in to work — juxtaposing journalism’s ongoing pursuit of truth against the perpetual threat of unchecked corporate violence. When Clark literally falls off the face of the planet after surrendering to the U.S. government, it’s Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) who sparks his rescue; Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi) makes the caper possible, but he would likely have stayed behind to bicker with Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Guy (Nathan Fillion) if Lois had not presented him with evidence and convinced him to take action. And in the end, it’s Lois and Jimmy Olsen’s (Skyler Gisondo) reporting that convinces the world to turn on Luthor, restoring the average person’s faith in Superman — which, in the film’s calculus, is equivalent to embracing the goodness (or at least the good intent) in humanity writ large.
Admittedly, Lois’ needling at Clark about the ethics of interviewing himself as Superman is a little rich when it is also very unethical to interview someone you are secretly dating, so I feel like Gunn gave my industry a bit of a backhanded compliment here (which isn't helped by the newscast proclaiming that everyone owes Supes an apology). Like the rest of Superman, though, I think it still holds up in a broad sense. When the world is drenched in waves of new disinformation and bigoted propaganda every second — abetted or originated by people already in power, hashtag SuperShit — delivering hard facts and counternarratives to the public, especially about vulnerable and marginalized communities, is more crucial than ever. Not every story will end a war, but again, there’s a reason why Luthor has all of his girlfriends disappeared. In 2025, even a no-name blogger or a selfie-obsessed ditz has the power to ruin a capitalist supervillain’s life.
And if you ask me, that’s pretty punk rock.