HOT PRESS 5/14/25: Superman, Friendship, More Superman
DC Studios' new trailer and Paul Rudd's mustache have me feeling some kind of way.
Braving the gauntlet of tentpole events, off-the-radar releases, and a non-stop avalanche of movies, TV, comics, and other stuff that's bad for you is DoomRocket's HOT PRESS. This week: that Superman trailer, my final dispatch from this year’s Chicago Critics Film Festival, and some more Superman chatter because why not?
DC Studios dropped the first official trailer for this summer’s Superman, finally, at last, oh boy, it’s real, etc. It’s difficult for me to be objective about this film — though, come on, when have I ever been Serious-Pants Critic Guy? However, looking at the totality of this two-minute, fifty-nine-second trailer, I feel even more confident that it will work. I wrote at length about why I felt James Gunn was the perfect director for a fresh take on the character back in 2023 for another site, which you can read here. Back then, all I had to base my reasoning on was his body of work and intuition.
Seeing Superman’s trailer, replete with dialogue (banter, even!), action, and a stronger idea of its plot, I’m almost convinced. All that’s left for me to make an official proclamation is to see the film itself, which you can bet your freshly cleaned boots I will be doing come July 11. (If not beforehand — editors, I’m available for this review assignment. Gimme a buzz.)
Now, here are my five most pressing thoughts on the Superman trailer, as it is all I am able to think about today.
1. Lois & Clark
To begin, they look great. Rachel Brosnahan and David Corenswet, from cadence to costuming, appear as though transposed from comic panel to screen. As this is the first time we’ve heard them speak to each other, I can see the vision: their snappy banter, how Clark has a nickname for Lois (“Cronkite!”), the way their impromptu interview quickly turns testy — there’s a lot of character work being done here, and I appreciate it. The hayseed Kent thinking that Lois Lane will play fair just because he grants her an interview as Superman. (How green is Kent in this iteration?) Lois doing the exact opposite and asking the tough questions befitting a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. (Has she won one of those yet, or is that still on the way?) The chemistry is there. Their repartee is solid, lots of smooching — peak iteration of Lois & Clark incoming. (P.S. The way Corenswet says “Ms. Lane?” Oh my.)
2. Lex
Nicolas Hoult is such an angry man in this; it’s great. We watch Lex suck at his teeth at the mere utterance of his hated foe. He says his name in fragments: “Super… man.” What a snob. There’s a bit where Gunn juxtaposes Superman getting his face smashed into the pavement with a shot of Lex watching from on high with a satisfied sneer on his face, and it’s perfect. Hate and jealousy are what drive Luthor in most iterations, and these primary motivations for royally mucking up Superman’s life appear in the film, clear as Kryptonian crystal. “He’s not a man; he’s an it… that’s somehow become the focal point of the entire world’s conversation. I will not accept that.” Only question I have left: will Hoult be wearing Lex’s anti-Superman warsuit or what? The greatest criminal mind of our time deserves a new fit!
3. The Kents
As someone who spent part of his youth on a farm, I enjoy and appreciate Gunn’s humble take on the Kents. Pruitt Taylor Vince plays Pa, Neva Howell plays Ma, and both get speaking time in the trailer. (Honestly, I expected to see more Metropolis than Smallville in this trailer.) Pa’s words are the typical lofty dialogue we’ve heard across virtually all other Super-media (“Your choices, your actions, that’s what makes you who you are”), though I am in awe over how the dear-hearted fella from James Mangold’s Heavy is the actor delivering these lines in a $100 million Warner Bros tentpole movie. His casting gives that line added oomph for me. As for Howell, she’s appropriately folksy in supporting her adopted son: “I cleaned your boots! I’ll go get ‘em for ya.” The Kents appear to be less generically quaint than modern versions of folks struggling with the American dream, which gives shape to this new, frustrated version of Clark Kent.
4. The Justice League? Or something more Terrific?
We were treated to fresh footage of the various DC heroes appearing in Gunn’s ground-zero DC Universe film: Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi), and Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan). We know that Gardner, Terrific, and Hawkgirl are working for Maxwell Lord (Sean Gunn) in some capacity, though we’ll have to wait for the second season of Peacemaker to appreciate the finer details of their working relationship and what Lord’s role in the DCU might be going forward. (Friend or foe? Friend who becomes foe? Foe in friend’s clothing? It’s Max flippin’ Lord; he’s breaking bad eventually — but I digress.) I’m digging all the mecha-toys Terrific uses in this — that floaty sky-chair and his patented T-Spheres; I’m pumped. We also spot Terrific seemingly off on a sidequest with Lois Lane at one point in this trailer — does his increased profile coincide with Metamorpho’s (who shares a prison cell with Superman), and does that insinuate that a Terrifics movie is potentially in the offing, should Superman make a bundle in ticket sales? Sure, I’m grasping, but anything that gives me hope that I’ll see a live-action Plastic Man is a good thing.
5. Um, Krypto better be okay
One location that Gunn hasn’t been bashful about showcasing in his promotion for the film is Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, home to the amped-up Super-Dog Krypto and a small armada of Superman Robots. The teaser revealed one Super-Bot in a state of disrepair, and now we have a better idea of why: Luthor and his formidable techno-ally, The Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría), have broken in to presumably steal some items and/or information from the Man of Steel. That’s not a new plot point — it happened in both Superman II and Superman Returns — but the Engineer’s spinning arm-blades certainly put a new, vicious twist on it. That look on her face after Krypto knocks her to the ground is freaky — Krypto better come out of this home invasion in one piece, James Gunn; he’s a good boy and deserves a sequel!
A PSA for all casting directors: Tim Robinson is a liability. Cast him in anything outside a full-on lampoon and risk deflating the drama, mystery, menace, or any emotions vital to your film. At least, that's the impression I got during my screening of Andrew DeYoung's debut feature Friendship, in which the audience howled every time Robinson's mug entered the frame. All this is not to say Robinson isn't a captivating performer — in fact, he's on my very snooty shortlist of the best comedians alive. But if you're casting for anything other than slobbering insanity, you're barking up the wrong buster. His chaos crushes sense and reason.
Luckily, the star and co-creator of I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson shambles from streaming to theaters in a movie that plays to his comedic strengths, if only those. Friendship, unquestionably a dark comedy about aging, loneliness, and egocentricity, functions best as an extended ITYSLWTR sketch; even when it inevitably pulls beyond this limitation, the film remains blisteringly funny. Its primary weaknesses, which will only matter to prickly wonks like me, surface once the film begins to mire in the gnarlier psychology of Robinson's hapless character. As Craig Waterman, a beige Everyman goof, Robinson makes heroic attempts to meet DeYoung halfway regarding the film's depiction of parasocial envy and belligerent narcissism. In a story grounded in stunted maturity and male toxicity, his manic schtick sends the film careening into a zigzag of moods.
Now, the plot. Craig, a social misfit largely ignored by colleagues and family alike, becomes enamored with his cool new neighbor, Austin Carmichael, the local weatherman and garage band frontman played by Paul Rudd with a studly mustache. Their budding buddy-buddy begins when Craig delivers a package mistakenly sent to his home. Their banter is neighborly and playful, and Austin invites Craig to hang out, sparking a bond between them. The ease of this initial interaction raises a question: why would a handsome middle-aged guy with a killer job, a close circle of friends, and a beautiful wife so eagerly welcome this stranger with famished emotional hunger in his eyes? Other pertinent questions enrich the film's first half, where Robinson's mania is more restrained: Does Austin pity Craig? Maybe he sees a flicker of shared madness behind Craig's off-puttingly cracked smile? The answers to come are frustratingly vague, but Rudd and Robinson's performances are so symbiotically peculiar that it's impossible not to lean in anyway.
The film doesn't fully unearth all the rich ore of its premise, but it does raise two cogent points: it is damned hard for adults to make friends, and sometimes it's just not worth the bandwidth or heartache. In fact, once Austin grasps that Craig's presence cramps his style — amiable work advice ends up souring Austin's career, and Craig doesn't seem to understand restraint during a friendly boxing match — he ditches his would-be pal for stability (and vanishes for large stretches of the film), leaving Craig lost in a haze of hurt feelings and directionless anger. What was it about super-cool Austin that prompted Craig to leave his cozy armchair in the first place? How does this personal awakening damage his already languishing marriage to Tami (Kate Mara), whose recovery from cancer has given her a chance at happiness without her clueless husband? These story beats remain murky, too. The one dramatic constant is how Craig's emotional crisis wreaks havoc on everyone in his path.
Robinson sells the spiral. Friendship's cracked bromance is a suitable playground for his signature flopsweat freakouts, and reliably, he goes big. And that's the rub: Robinson pushes the movie to such comic heights that DeYoung struggles to counterbalance it with drama — his attempts at depicting marital strife and the increasing hostility between Craig and his son (Jack Dylan Grazer) fizzle compared to Robinson's sequences of social apocalypse. One dramatic exception stands out: Craig's desire to be seen. His hunger to be as cool as Austin — not just liked, but admired — ultimately gives his actions a compelling and deranged shape. In those moments, Friendship brushes against something more universal than cringe: the ache of middle-aged irrelevance. It sucks getting old. Friendship suggests that fighting it sucks even worse.
7 / 10
Friendship had its Chicago Critics Film Festival premiere at the Music Box Theatre on May 4.
Written and directed by Andrew DeYoung.
Starring Tim Robinson, Kate Mara, Jack Dylan Grazer, and Paul Rudd.
97 mins. / Rated R for gun-toting monkeyshines and some unexpected ass licking.
Jackson "Butch" Guice died this past month. As the artist of Action Comics from 1992 to 1995, pencilling off and on from issues #676 to #711 (and an unforgettable #0 issue I may talk about here some day), naturally, he left an indelible impact on me at a young age. This week, I wanted to honor Guice by focusing on his unsung talents as an inker.
As far as covers go, Action Comics #692 is one of the more confident and iconic from the Superman line’s vaunted Triangle Era. It’s a pin-up cover and doesn’t exactly reveal a story beat from the pages contained within, but brother, does it pack a wallop. For one, it sells its new version of Clark Kent — back from the dead with a healthy head of long, luscious hair to boot. Kerry Gammill's pencils were among the sturdiest from this era, fitting in nicely with the house style established by Jerry Ordway, Tom Grummett, and Dan Jurgens; naturally, his take on Clark Kent changing into Superman met these 90s-stud times head-on.
Guice's inks push the image into overdrive. The shadows, the hatching, the spaces where light catches or doesn't are all boosted by his quill. Guice was good at making his figures appear as if they wandered off a magazine. Here, he maximized the chiseled features Gammill gave Kent, making him look like a refugee from Men's Vogue. Superman endured temporary changes in the wild Nineties, but Guice and Gammill's linework made damn sure that the character's iconic visage — from his granite jaw and steely gaze to twin fists pulling his disguise apart to reveal the hero underneath — remained ironclad.
That's all I got for this week. Read any good comics lately? See any movies? Drop your new favorites, recommendations, and questions (any at all!) in the comments or The Chat. Or, heck, just shoot me a line: jarrod@doomrocket.com.