That font. Those images. The name of a famous superhero movie director. Everything about the trailer for BrightBurn feels like a riff on Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, especially if you’re a savvy, connected superhero movie fan and you know James Gunn recently made the leap to DC from Marvel. But this isn’t a Superman movie: it’s a movie that uses all the trappings of the Superman origin story to tell an entirely more frightening tale. And if you thought the DCEU Kal-El was overly dark before, well, it’s possible you ain’t seen nothin’ yet:
Gunn is just the producer on this one, but his brothers Brian and Mark wrote the script for director David Yarovesky (The Hive). But in keeping with Gunn’s pre-Marvel comic-ish movie Super, which proclaimed that “with no powers comes no responsibility,” Brightburn asks the question, “What if a child from another world crash-landed on Earth, but instead of becoming a hero to mankind, he proved to be something far more sinister?” You’re probably not going to stop him by saying “Martha,” especially since we don’t actually know yet what Elizabeth Banks‘ Ma Kent-like figure is named yet.Will he snap necks? Or just crunch down on a few new forks? We haven’t seen superheroes this slow and scary since M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable universe, and they’re giving us nightmares already. Which seems woefully unfair, since it’s only early afternoon as of publication time. Yarovesky pulled no punches in The Hive, and if his powered-up creation does likewise, General Zod’s demise is gonna look like a picnic.
