Almost immediately after it was confirmed Henry Cavill was officially out of the DCU when Superman: Legacy was revealed to be another reboot, James Gunn was quick to shut down any talk that he’d personally and professionally embarrassed the long-tenured Kal-El.
You could see why that conclusion had been reached, when Dwayne Johnson had very publicly been telling anyone who’d listen that he’d spent six years trying to bring the franchise’s canonical Kryptonian back into the fold, only for Cavill taking to social media to celebrate his comeback as the full-time incumbent of the spandex aging like milk in an instant.
When the Chapter 1 – Gods & Monsters slate was unveiled, Gunn made a point of trashing the old Warner Bros. and DC regime – as well as Cavill’s representatives – for allowing him to be “dicked around.” Now, after the filmmaker-turned-executive surprisingly revealed that he’d been hired to pen the screenplay for Legacy before Black Adam had even hit theaters, it’s become clear that he knew a great deal more than he was letting on.
We’d heard chatter that a Man of Steel sequel was one of many Superman-related projects being bandied around behind the scenes at DC headquarters prior to the installation of Gunn and Safran as co-CEOs, but a reboot being written surreptitiously at the same time Johnson and Cavill were setting out their own stall makes it look as though the SnyderVerse stalwart’s comeback was always doomed to fail.
In hindsight, “dicked around” may have been selling it short when it appears as if Cavill was never in line to return to the spotlight as the DCU’s full-time Big Blue Boy Scout.
