Henry Cavill’s Kal-El is finally back in cinemas. But the original superhero deserves to be more than cameo fodder
In 1978, Superman was the lead character in the year’s highest-grossing motion picture, a cross-generational hero, and the augur of a cultural shift that would change the shape of Hollywood over the next 40 years. Today, he’s the guy who shows up for 25 seconds at the end of someone else’s film, then delivers a couple of lines vaguely intimating that a sequel is on the way, before the screen cuts to black.
Is this what the übermensch also known as Clark Kent and Kal-El has been reduced to? Apparently so, as audiences at screenings of Black Adam have been discovering this week, when Henry Cavill makes his brief cameo appearance during the closing credits, sporting his suit from 2013’s Man of Steel and a Christopher Reeve-style kiss curl bouncing on his forehead.
The scene is standard teaser material in many respects – it’s essentially an advert for a product that only exists as a promise; consumerism gone Pentecostal. But in this particular case, it’s also the perfect summation of Hollywood’s ongoing inability to work out what to do with arguably the archetypal superhero – or at least the most easily identifiable member of his breed.
From emblem to costume and cape, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s creation can properly be described as iconic – there’s a reason Action Comics #1, with its enticingly ambiguous cover image of Superman smashing a green sedan against a rock for unclear reasons, is the most valuable comic book ever printed. And in Cavill, Warner Bros has an actor who seems to have a coherent vision for the role: other views are, of course, deafeningly available, but I was wholly won over by his aloof, enigmatic rendering of the character in both Man of Steel and the Zack Snyder-approved final cut of Justice League. So why on earth is he now doomed to spend his next few films playing the Sooty to Dwayne Johnson’s Sweep?