The New 'Superman' Hinges on a Radical Reinvention of the Man of Steel's Parents

Time​ Magazine

20 hours ago

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the plot of Superman.
The new Superman movie is pointedly not an origin story for the iconic hero. Audiences have already seen the planet Krypton blow up, watched Kryptonian scientist Jor-El and his wife Lara send baby Kal-El in rocket ship to Earth, and witnessed Clark Kent grow into a superpowered young man in Kansas, raised by his adoptive human parents Ma and Pa Kent. The '78 movie did it, as did Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, and it's such an iconic bit of pop culture that even people who don't read comics probably know the gist of it. It makes sense, then, that James Gunn's new movie doesn't retell this familiar tale. Instead, 2025's Superman starts when the hero has already been fighting crime for three years, reeling from his first loss in a battle.
And yet, despite not being an origin story, Superman makes one of the biggest changes to Superman's origin the character has ever seen. There's a major plot twist involving Superman's Kryptonian parents (as well as a far less extreme but still notable reimagining of his human parents) that has big implications for the character going forward.
Superman makes a major change to Jor-El and Lara
When we meet Superman (David Corenswet) in the new movie, he's just gotten beat to hell by one of Lex Luthor's (Nicholas Hoult) supervillains and he retreats back to his Fortress of Solitude in Antarctica to recover. His robot servants start playing the holographic message his Kryptionian parents, Jor-El and Lara, left for him when he was a baby, since they know it comforts Superman. Played in a surprise cameo role by Bradley Cooper (who worked with Gunn on the Guardians of the Galaxy movies) and Westworld's Angela Sarafyan, the two speak in their native Kryptionian language while an English voice-over translates what they're saying. It's what you'd expect—they love their son, they're sending him to Earth so he can survive, etc., etc.
However, the full recording got damaged when little baby Clark's ship crashed, so he's never seen the second half of the message. When Lex Luthor breaks into the Fortress of Solitude, he has one of his metahuman henchmen, the Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría), hack into Superman's files. She's able to recover the damaged part of his parents' message, which Luthor promptly shares with the world because it will do more to destroy Superman's reputation than he could've hoped. Jor-El and Lara are sending him to Earth with the hopes that he'll use his superpowers to rule it, encouraging their son to get a "harem" of Earth women so he can breed a spawn of half-Kryptonian superbabies. Superman initially hopes that Luthor faked the footage, but nope, it's legit.
In other words, Superman's Kryptonian parents are kinda evil! This is wildly different from pretty much every past iteration of Jor-El and Lara. There's not really a comic-book precedent for this. Though Superman has had a few different canonical backstories in the comics, no mainstream origin had a Jor-El who sent his son to Earth for nefarious reasons. (Terence Stamp's Jor-El from the Smallville TV show is probably the highest-profile version of a Jor-El with dubious morals, but he wasn't this bad!) In the Richard Donner movie, Marlon Brando played Jor-El, and he radiated nobility and goodness even though Brando was reading all his lines from cue cards. In the Snyder movie, Russell Crowe played Jor-El, and he too had a noble, egalitarian quality. Both past movie superdads were major characters in the first act of their movies, unlike Cooper's Jor-El, and they also left their son messages encouraging him to help the people of Earth.
"They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be," Brando's Jor-El says. "They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you... my only son." That's a far cry from "Get yourself a harem of Earth girls."
Superman's goodness—the thing that makes him so special, even more so than his parents—has historically been chalked up to what both sets of his parents bestowed upon him. So, if this new movie Superman's biological parents were kinda evil, what about his adoptive folks?
Ma and Pa Kent are different, too
Superman also makes some changes to Jonathan and Martha Kent, the kindly couple who find a baby in their Smallville farm and raise him as their own. They're played here by Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell, who are hardly major actors; Vince is a prolific character actor who isn't close to a household name and Neva Howell didn't have a Wikipedia page when Superman premiered. Compare them to Man of Steel's Kevin Costner and Diane Lane or the '78 Superman, which had Western star Glenn Ford in the Jonathan role. (Martha was played by Phyllis Thaxter, a legitimate actress but one who was also the mother-in-law of the movie's producer, so that's a less damning comparison, granted.)
Both previous movie versions of the Kents were paragons of a certain kind of Americana nobility, strong, proud farmers from the heartland. There's an undeniable love and warmth to them, but also a stoicism as they teach their son all the right values and the responsibilities that come with his incredible abilities. Costner's Jonathan Kent suggests that his son maybe should've let his classmates drown rather than risk exposing himself by pulling their crashed bus out of the water, an incredibly weird yet on-brand choice by Snyder, though even that characterization is in service of making him out to be a serious, wise patriarch.
In contrast, the 2025 Kents are kind of a joke, at first. They're originally introduced talking to their son over the phone, having tech trouble, making unhelpful suggestions, with exaggerated midwestern accents. They also don't share Superman's physique, looking more like an average American than, well, like Kevin Costner and Diane Lane. Rather than being some idealized super-parents, they are just kind of normal.
When Superman and Lois Lane need to make a pit stop at the family farm later in the film, the Kents appear in the flesh. (Jonathan is still alive in this movie, unlike in the past films where he died in Clark's youth. Pa Kent's early death is not, historically, canon in the comic books.) It's during this trip home that we get a chance to see who these Kents really are, as Jonathan sits next to his grown-up boy on a bench and happily thinks about his childhood and how proud of Clark he is. They didn't raise their son for some greater purpose—as Pa tells Clark, "Parents aren't for telling their children who they're supposed to be." Instead, they just loved him. The movie ends with Superman in his Fortress of Solitude watching a different message from his parents; no longer the Kryoptonian one but a collage of home videos from when he was growing up, playing with Ma and Pa Kent.
This Superman's parents put the focus on the character's humanity
While past movie Supermen were born of the best of Krypton, brave scientists with the best intentions, and raised by the salt-of-the-earth epitome of "Real America," this Superman's folks are villains and normies, respectively. It's a big change to an origin story that doesn't typically get messed with to this extent, but it's one that speaks to the theme of Gunn's new take on Superman.
Snyder's films, which the Gunn movie is in clear opposition to (Snyder wouldn't be caught dead putting a cute little superpowered dog like Krypto in his Superman movie), were very much focused on Superman's alien-ness. Man of Steel views Superman as a god, and in subsequent movies he's presented as a possible threat to humanity. Throughout the Snyder films, it's clear Superman doesn't quite fit in on Earth. The Gunn movie, though, basically throws all of Superman's emotional ties to Krypton out the Fortress of Solitude's crystalline window. The 2025 Superman is all about the title character's humanity, to the point where Superman gives Luthor a very on-the-nose (though not ineffective!) speech about how human he is, having worries and insecurities and fears just like everybody else.
Depicting Superman's Kryptonian parents as enemies of humanity is a drastic change, and as a result it ends up pushing the character away from Krypton and towards humanity. Making his human parents be more relatably, charmingly, and dorkily human than the impossibly noble, larger-than-life past takes on Ma and Pa Kent strengthens this idea even more. He may still have alien powers, an alien dog, robot servants, and a secret sci-fi base, but no Superman has been as human as this.