It’s been over three months since J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot were announced to be producing a Superman reboot for Warner Bros. with a script by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and in that time there’s been no shortage of rumors, speculation, criticism, backlash, wariness, dismay and almost everything in between.
Fans have been desperate to see a new standalone outing for the Big Blue Boy Scout for the last eight years, but when it finally gets announced it’s without Henry Cavill, which was enough to spark a minor uproar. Abrams and Coates have said next to nothing about the project since the news first broke, but a report indicating wholesale changes being made to the character didn’t sit too well with a lot of Superman supporters, and there was even talk of a boycott whenever the finished product arrived.
In a new interview, Coates finally broke his self-imposed silence on rebooting the hero, and he’s fully aware of both the expectations and inevitable criticism that comes from putting a new spin on a cultural icon that’ll be completely different to any live-action interpretation we’ve seen before.
“Nothing I can say would be helpful here. Absolutely nothing. Nothing I can say will do anything to improve how this film is ultimately received. I got a big thing: I want people to have their own experience with the art, and I don’t want to step on it. I don’t want them to hear me. I don’t want them to see me. As much as possible, I really don’t want them to see me. I want them to see what we ultimately produce. I’m not even being coy here.”
We live in an era where people, because you have social media and can share so much, the instinct when you’re creating is to let fans in on the process, to let them see where you’re going. And I might could do that after. That might be an aftermath thing I would do, but I do worry about doing injustice to the art. I just worry that you are, however unintentionally, seeding ideas in people’s head. Now, look, there’s a point where you have trailers and things where I’m going to have to talk about it, but if it were up to me, I wouldn’t say anything ever until it’d been out and seen and consumed and all of that.I don’t want to get in the way. I want Superman to have his chance. I really want him to live. I want him to be greeted. I don’t want me and whatever baggage the narrative of me has to overshadow that. I’ve said things in the past when I was working on things, and I guess this is still true.”
At the end of the day, let’s just hope that whatever Abrams and Coates are cooking up for Superman results in a great movie, because Cavill has been sitting on the sidelines for a long time as his canonical Kal-El warms the DCEU bench, and if the duo don’t deliver, then it’ll be a serious case of ‘we told you so’ on the part of the fanbase. Not to mention that by the time the reboot eventually releases, which won’t be for a while yet given that the first draft of the script isn’t expected to be handed in until December, the complexion of the DC Films roster could look markedly different once again, so it needs to be a home run.