Superman’s three favourite movies, according to David Corenswet: “He turns it off before the end”
Superheroes remain big business, but the genre has been so popular for so long that audiences are getting used to the most famous costumed crimefighters being in a state of perpetual rebooting, with David Corenswet the third actor to play Superman on the big screen in less than two decades.
It’s technically four, if you include Ben Affleck as George Reeves in the biopic Hollywoodland, and he’s also part of the problem. Having been ousted by Robert Pattinson as Batman, he joins Christian Bale as one of three actors to suit up as the ‘Dark Knight’ in the last 20 years.
There have also been three Spider-Men since 2002, so it’s clear that the relentless churn of origin stories, gadgets, and villains will never stop. For Corenswet, embodying the title character in James Gunn’s Superman could be a make-or-break moment, one that has the potential to make him either the next Christopher Reeve or the next Brandon Routh, depending on how the dominoes fall.
It’s the biggest role of the actor’s fledgling career so far, and a significant step up from supporting parts in the likes of Ti West’s Pearl, Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters, and Ryan Murphy’s Netflix shows The Politician and Hollywood. How high can a (super)man fly? Audiences will find out when Superman soars into cinemas in July 2025, and it’s arriving at a time when superhero fatigue is reaching critical levels.
However, Gunn has plenty of previous experience with the genre after helming Marvel Studios’ massively successful and widely acclaimed Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, never mind his current position as co-CEO of an entire movie studio, and he’s looking more towards Richard Donner than Zack Snyder for reinventing the alien who wears his underpants on the outside for a new generation.
As tends to be the case whenever an actor is cast as a comic book character, Corenswet got jacked to pull double duty as Clark Kent and his alter-ego. It’s not all about the biceps and pecs, though, with the actor getting even more into character by naming his Superman’s three favourite films of all time. Or at least, what he imagines they’d be, a decision he’s better placed than anyone else to make in 2025.
Because Affleck will seemingly never be able to outrun the shadow of the superhero movies he’s come to so bitterly regret, his name came up again in a roundabout way when Corenswet settled on Good Will Hunting as Superman’s first pick. George Lucas’ spacefaring epic Star Wars also made the cut, which creates the odd mental image of an alien watching movies about aliens in his spare time, but to each their own.
For some good ol’ fashioned Americana, Corenswet named 1957’s Old Yeller as Superman’s third and final favourite flick, which seems rather traumatic when the all-powerful being from outer space was raised on a Kansas farm, where his adoptive parents presumably had no issues with him watching a film where a loveable dog was dragged around the back and shot to permanently scar anyone who wasn’t ready to say goodbye to the rabies-infested canine.
Fortunately, there’s a caveat, with Corenswet noting how Superman “turns it off before the end” to save himself the hassle of crying floods of superpowered tears over Old Yeller’s heart-wrenching demise.
