Superman is having his moment in the sun. The James Gunn written and directed film — which has been met with glowing reactions on social media and currently sits on Rotten Tomatoes with an 85 percent approval from critics, one of DC’s best scores on the review aggregator — is flying high with audiences. Rotten Tomatoes confirmed Wednesday that Superman is officially “verified hot” with an impressive 96% audience score from more than 1,000 verified ratings on the Popcornmeter following Amazon Prime Early Access screenings Tuesday night and early rollouts in international territories.
That’s the best-ever audience score for a DC film, surpassing critically acclaimed films like Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight (both 94%) and trilogy ender The Dark Knight Rises (90%), The Batman (87%), Wonder Woman (83%), Shazam! (82%), and Gunn’s own The Suicide Squad (82%).
Superman‘s audience score soared past the 1978 original starring Christopher Reeve (86%) and its three sequels, Superman II (76%), Superman III (23%), and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (16%). In the modern era, 2006’s Superman Returns notched 60%, and the Zack Snyder-directed 2013 Man of Steel took flight with 75%. Other films with Henry Cavill’s Man of Steel include 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (63%), 2017’s Justice League (67%), Snyder’s 2021 director’s cut Zack Snyder’s Justice League (92%), and 2022’s Black Adam (87%).
ComicBook’s Spencer Perry noted in his Superman review that Gunn “is unafraid to embrace the comic book elements at the heart of the source material,” praising the Guardians of the Galaxy helmer for a high-flying film that has “a pitch-perfect cast, oozes style in its action set pieces, and has a poise that many DC fans have been waiting to see realized in live-action.”
“As audiences have found themselves in a malaise regarding superheroes, Superman has landed almost as an antidote to that,” Perry continues. “The new movie reminds us why this subgenre consumed Hollywood for over a decade, taking what fans have always loved about a character and world and making it feel real. It would have been easy for James Gunn, now over a decade after the release of the first Guardians of the Galaxy, to have no gas in the tank for this kind of film. What Superman proves, though, is that he’s one of our best architects for superhero stories on mainstream platforms, and the DCU is in great hands if this is what they were able to deliver out of the gate.”
DC Studios’ Superman — starring David Corenswet as Clark Kent/Superman, Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, and Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, with Edi Gathegi as Mister Terrific, Anthony Carrigan as Metamorpho, Nathan Fillion as Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen, Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher, María Gabriela de Faría as Angela Spica/the Engineer, Wendell Pierce as The Daily Planet editor-in-chief Perry White, Neva Howell as Ma Kent, Pruitt Taylor Vince as Pa Kent, Sean Gunn as Maxwell Lord, and Frank Grillo as Rick Flag Sr. — opens in US theaters July 11.
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