James Gunn's Superman Is Going Back To A Winning Formula
After long last, the banner DC movies aren't overstaying their welcome.
There are a handful of reasons why blockbusters are great: they make movies into an event, create something you can talk about with just about everyone, and are the perfect excuse to sit in an air-conditioned room in the middle of the summer. However, they often can get a little bloated. If you caught Barbenheimer at your local theatre, Barbie’s 1 hour 54 minute runtime felt a lot more tolerable than Oppenheimer’s three hours.
The summer of 2024 is bringing back flagship superhero movies, with Marvel premiering The Fantastic Four: First Steps and DC premiering Superman, the first movie helmed by studio co-president James Gunn.
We’ll only get 129 minutes with Kal-El in Superman this July.
James Gunn recently confirmed on his Threads account that Superman is 2 hours and 9 minutes long, including the credits and post-credits scene (or maybe scenes?). If you’re keeping track at home, this 129-minute runtime is almost exactly the same as Superman II (127 minutes) and Superman III (125 minutes). Superman: The Movie, on the other hand, was a good deal longer at 143 minutes, but the home video release cut it down to 127 minutes, so this runtime is very par for the course.
But Superman exists in a much bigger world than just its decades-old predecessors. This runtime actually puts it at the shorter end of the current DC Universe, movies — it’s only longer than Birds of Prey, Suicide Squad, and Justice League.
Justice League (2017) was shorter than Superman, but Zack Snyder’s Justice League was much longer.
It’s only right Gunn kick off his DC blockbuster era with a shorter movie. During Zack Snyder’s tenure, movies could stretch well into the 2.5-hour mark, and that’s not even considering the four-hour Snyder Cut. Gunn has always been an exacting filmmaker — his movies seldom need reshoots — so it’s good to know he can keep the runtime to a doable number.
Hopefully, this is a trend that will continue, and we’ll get big, ambitious movie that don’t waste a single second, and, more importantly, don’t need the viewer to schedule in a bathroom break.
