The Year Superhero Movies Turned To Hope

What makes a protagonist cool? When it comes to heroic narratives, there tends to be a binary; either our star character is tight-lipped and detached, or they are forthright and obvious. This dichotomy is probably best exemplified as the difference between DC’s Batman and Superman. Regardless of all the evidence to the contrary, our shared default notions of the two heroes come down to this: Batman is brooding, a man of few words, while Superman often smiles and is generally more chatty. The point is costumed superheroes by their very definition carry with them a slightly absurd, performative element but also a kind of duality of lightness and darkness. As Margaret Atwood pointed in her book In Other Worlds: “A comic-book character living a split life and engaged in a battle between Good and Evil might well be expected to show Jungian characteristics.”

Batman tends to be the go-to character with his kind of analysis (the hero, the rebel, the orphan), but what about the sunnier guys? Don’t Mr. Fantastic and Superman have something to say about the human condition, too?

This year, with two major movies — Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps — the world of cinematic superheroes answered that question with a big yes. Dark and gritty superheroes are out, and upbeat superheroes are in. But these films didn’t deliver the optimistic goods by simply having characters smile; instead, there’s another secret weapon going on here: a kind of rebellious goofiness.

The Real Punk Rock

By now, the conversation between Clark Kent (David Corenswet) and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) in James Gunn’s Superman has become a kind of battle cry for kindness. When Lois Lane asserts that Clark is “not punk rock,” he challenges her definition of “punk rock” as a kind of substitute for what we consider cool, without trying to be cool. “I question everything and everyone,” Lois says. “You trust everyone and think that everyone you’ve ever met is, like, beautiful.” Clark’s response is clear, honest, and sweet: “Maybe that’s the real punk rock.”

Now, to be clear, Lois does have a point. It’s hard to square the idea of Superman with the basic ethos of punk rock, because, for most of his history Superman has not been anti-establishment, but rather part of the establishment. That clearly goes against the definition of punk. Punks must be willing to tear down the system, or at least fight the system. In the collective memory, you can’t get more establishment than Superman, even if he technically started as a kind of punk rock dude who took the law into his own hands. But it was in the 1940s, during WWII, when Superman’s previous persona of a vigilante who beat up slum lords transformed into the Big Blue Boy Scout we think of today. “The process of becoming a symbol [in the 1940s] smoothed Superman’s rough edges and shaped him into something safer,” Glen Weldon writes in his book Superman: The Unauthorized Biography. “Once hunted as a vigilante mystery man, he now started working alongside the police.”

In essence, when it comes to law and order, Superman hasn’t been punk rock since the 1930s. Which makes the lawbreaking Clark in the new film something of a fusion of different takes on the character: He’s taking the law into his own hands, but he’s retained the gee-shucks persona from his more famous postwar comic book roots. In 2025’s Superman, the character is technically at odds with the establishment in a big way. From mainstream businessman Lex Luthor, to the actual laws of the United States, and to the press, the basic cultural establishments in Superman’s universe do not like him. But does that make him punk rock?

Kindness is the new anti-establishment.

Maybe. Gunn, whether he meant to or not, caused countless viewers to think that Superman was an analogy for various current geopolitical issues. Gunn has denied this, telling Variety: “Absolutely 100 percent of that movie was written and done before anything ever happened between Israel and Palestine, and everyone continues to refuse to believe that that’s not what it’s about. It’s not. It just isn’t.”

But the more interesting thing about the 2025 Superman isn’t that Supe is punk rock because he’s fighting against the man or has a warrant out for his arrest from the DOJ. Kindness is the new anti-establishment.

The message Gunn was sending with Superman smiling, listening to Iggy Pop and Teddybears’ “Punkrocker” at the end of the movie, is that the anti-establishment stance Clark takes as Superman is one of pro-kindness and pro-optimism. This ending perfectly mirrors the ’90s’ most punk film, SLC Punk. At its end, Matthew Lillard as a newborn Stevo, in a suit with a freshly shorn head (no more mohawk), says, “You can do a helluva lot more damage in the system than outside of it. … That was the final irony, I think.” Such irony would not be lost on Supe, or Gunn.

Superman’s mild lawlessness in the name of kindness strikes a similar chord. It doesn’t have to be a political one, but instead, a sort of aesthetic choice. In both the text and subtext of Superman, there’s an assumption that being honest and kind isn’t part of the establishment. Being good is no longer the norm. And so, in a world of cruelty, Superman’s kindness becomes an act of rebellion.

Dorky Dads For the Win

While Superman told the story of a lone hero deciding that yes, he’s going to keep on being a super nice guy, Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps decided to reboot one of the most foundational superteams in history and did with arguably a risky premise. From the very first scene, Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) are expectant parents. As Richards, Pascal gives perhaps his best performance as a protective parent, in a long line of him playing father figures. In The Mandalorian and The Last of Us, Pascal was a survivalist dad, good by default, because he’s keeping his charge alive. In First Steps, he is a literal dorky dad, and that personality trait — not his elastic superpowers — defines the character and the ethos of the film more than anything.

Did the general audience cheer for a guy building a crib and three dudes trying to put a car seat in correctly? Despite some naysaying from critics and general box office malaise about any film that wasn’t The Minecraft Movie, the truth is, prior to the release of Avatar: Fire and Ash, The Fantastic Four: First Steps was the 10th most successful movie globally, and the sixth domestically, essentially neck and neck with Sinners. (Superman was third domestically, and eighth globally.) So, yes, people loved this movie (this car seat-installing dad included).

The charm of The Fantastic Four is similar to Superman in one respect: The characters are compelling not because they are detached or brooding, but because they’re dorks. Johnny (Joseph Quinn) gets super dorky about new spacesuits, Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) tries to pretend like he’s not in love with Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), and Sue is a dork by association for putting up with her dorky family.

The true genius of The Fantastic Four is that they are “real, vulnerable, and often clumsy and silly human beings.”

Matt Shakman’s First Steps has a veneer of fake nostalgia, set in an alternate 1960s with flying cars, keyboards that clack, and a silly robot that seems to have a reel-to-reel tape for a face. These things are not accidents. The aesthetic is vintage, like Shakman found an old 1960s Fantastic Four comic, co-created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and dusted it off. The genuineness of Reed Richards is also an old idea, one that Shakman’s film makes new by specifically not trying to make Reed seem cool. As he and Sue take baby Franklin for a walk in the snow, Sue remarks that all of their inventions seem “terrifying now.” Reed replies quietly, “It can be beautiful again. Everything can.”

Without this kind of moment, without Reed’s quiet defiance against pessimism, the movie simply wouldn’t work. Yes, he can barely buckle in the car seat at the end, and yes, the dude failed his driving test, but who wouldn’t want this lovable dork saving the world?

As Jonathan Lethem wrote, in his new introduction to a 2025 collection of Fantastic Four comics, the “true genius” of The Fantastic Four was that they were “real, vulnerable, and often clumsy and silly human beings.” This is what made the movie great. Not just the aesthetic, not just the fantastic VFX. It was this, the idea that Reed and his family are silly, and very, very nice.

What the Hey, Dude?

In 2013, in the film Man of Steel, Superman (Henry Cavill) told Lois Lane (Amy Adams) that the “S” on his chest didn’t really stand for “Super” but instead, on the planet Krypton, it translated to “hope.” This wasn’t the first time the big “S” on Superman’s chest had been retconned as something other than a letter from the English alphabet. In the 1978 Richard Donner-directed Superman, we learned that the “S” was the crest of Superman’s family, the House of El. But the idea that Superman’s costume was meant to literally convey hope was deeply ironic since the film that posited this notion was bleak, muted, and arguably not filled with all that much hope. After all, Superman had to snap a dude’s neck in the climax of the movie, in front of a family.

Superman and Reed Richards know that they’re goofy dorks. And that’s why these characters will keep winning.

What a difference a decade makes. Both the 2025 Superman and Fantastic Four: First Steps feel like a return to a kind of family-friendly comic-book movie. Yes, there’s some scary stuff in both, but nobody swears in Fantastic Four, and there’s not a lot of guns being fired off either. In Superman, the Man of Steel doesn’t swear either, and cutely draws attention to this fact. After getting revived by the rays of the sun in the opening moments of the movie, Superman falls to the ground, picks himself up, and says, “Golly.” Then, seeing that Krypto the Superdog has made a mess of the Fortress of Solitude, he says to the dog, “What the hey, dude?”

Why does this work in 2025? Because also, at the end of the movie, in the postcredits scene, Superman says to himself, “Darn it, I can be such a jerk sometimes.” Only someone self-aware enough to make that assessment can get away with saying things like “golly.” Superman and Reed Richards know that they’re goofy dorks. And that’s why now, and always, these characters will keep winning.