This year’s Arrowverse crossover promises to be the most ambitious one yet. As revealed at the San Diego Comic-Con, “Crisis On Infinite Earths” will feature every hero from across The CW’s franchise who currently has a show and a host of additional faces from the DC universe that exist in other dimensions as well.
The most interesting addition to this multidimensional super team-up event will be Brandon Routh, who’ll once again portray Superman in addition to his regular role as The Atom/Ray Palmer. The showrunners have confirmed that this time the actor will appear as the version of Superman who we saw in the best selling graphic novel Kingdome Come, which presented a version of Kal-El that was a grizzled, cynical veteran who, following the death of his parents and his wife Lois Lane, had given up on humanity and retreated to his fortress.
In the graphic novel, the older generation of heroes went into partial or full retirement following Superman’s actions. The new breed of supers were violent, reckless individuals who turned the whole world into their personal battleground.
Following one particularly gruesome fight that obliterated Kansas, the Man of Steel was forced to come out of retirement to once again lead the old bastion of heroes. Only this Superman wasn’t so much a gentle beacon of hope as a battle-hardened general who was willing to make the hard choices in his quest to restore order to the world.
It’s a much grimmer take on the iconic character, and there’s no word yet whether Routh’s portrayal in “Crisis on Infinite Earths” will be based solely on the graphic novel or if it will be some kind of amalgamation of his own take from Superman Returns and the version in Kingdome Come. Either way though, the actor has welcomed the chance to put on the red cape and blue tights once again and views the opportunity as his way of saying a final goodbye to a character he’d once hoped to play across several movies.
