James Gunn didn’t just give his “Superman” sequel a name this week. He handed it a mission statement, a release date, and one piece of concept art that had DC fans doing a double-take at their phones. The movie is called “Man of Tomorrow,” it flies into theaters in July 2027, and the image Gunn posted alongside the announcement shows Superman standing shoulder to shoulder with the one person who has spent a lifetime trying to destroy him — Lex Luthor. That’s not a typo. That’s the pitch.
Rewind a couple of months for a second. “Superman” hit theaters in July and did precisely what it needed to do — relaunched a character Warner Bros. had fumbled for the better part of a decade, kicked open the door on Gunn’s rebuilt DC Universe, and turned David Corenswet (Superman) into an overnight fixture. A sequel was never really in doubt, and word that it was happening slipped out in August. What nobody had yet was a shape for the thing. On September 3, Gunn handed everyone that shape all at once. The sequel to a Superman movie is being sold as half a Lex Luthor movie. That’s either the boldest swing in the DCU so far, or the riskiest. Warning: beyond this point there are spoilers for Man of Tomorrow and the story details James Gunn just teased for the Superman sequel.
The sequel to a Superman movie is being sold as half a Lex Luthor movie. That’s either the boldest swing in the DCU so far, or the riskiest.”
Start with the basics. The title is “Man of Tomorrow” — and when a fan asked whether that actually meant “Superman: Man of Tomorrow,” Gunn cut it short: “Just Man of Tomorrow.” It opens July 9, 2027, almost exactly two years after the first film landed. Gunn is back to write and direct, with Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav confirming the studio had no intention of letting its freshly repaired crown jewel wander off to anyone else. Here’s where it stops being a routine sequel announcement. Gunn describes the film as a story about Lex Luthor and Superman having to work together, to a certain degree, against a much bigger threat — and then dropped the line that raised every eyebrow in the fandom: it’s “as much a Lex movie as it is a Superman movie.” Read that twice. The follow-up to a Superman film is being built as a two-hander with the villain. Not a redemption arc, not a heel turn, but a forced alliance where the smartest man on Earth and the strongest one have to share the same room without one of them ending up in a crater.
The concept art sells it better than any logline could. Gunn didn’t commission a glossy poster — he called in three of the most celebrated names in comics, Jim Lee, Jorge Jiménez, and Mitch Gerads, to sketch the tone. Lee’s piece is the one everyone’s passing around: Corenswet’s Superman standing next to Nicholas Hoult (Lex Luthor), who is finally wearing the green-and-purple War Suit lifted straight out of the comics — and Superman is casually holding a screwdriver, as if he helped bolt the thing together. It’s a single image that tells you the entire dynamic has shifted, and it does it without a word of dialogue.
The title choice is doing quiet work, too. “Man of Steel,” the Zack Snyder film that launched the last attempt at this universe, was about invulnerability — a Superman defined by what could hurt him and mostly couldn’t. “Man of Tomorrow” points somewhere completely different. It’s one of Superman’s oldest nicknames, and it leans hard into the thing Gunn’s version actually cares about: hope, the future, the notion that Superman is less a weapon than a promise. Trading “Steel” for “Tomorrow” is a thesis statement wearing the costume of a title.
The band, meanwhile, is coming back together. Corenswet returns as Superman, Hoult as Lex, and Rachel Brosnahan (Lois Lane) is expected back in the newsroom. Hoult’s Lex was the sharpest element of the first movie — a tech-billionaire monster who felt genuinely modern instead of a bald man scheming in a lab coat — so handing him half the sequel is far less of a gamble than it might sound on paper. If any Luthor has earned co-lead status this fast, it’s this one.
That’s what makes this announcement hit harder than a normal “sequel gets a date” story. Gunn is refusing to play it safe. The obvious move after a hit Superman movie is a bigger Superman movie — more punching, a splashier villain, a city buried under more rubble. Instead he’s betting that audiences are more interested in the chess match between Superman and Lex than in another slugfest, and he’s confident enough to name the film after that idea. It could be the smartest decision he makes with the DCU. It could also bewilder a general audience that just wants to watch Superman fly and hit things. We won’t know which for two years, and that wait is going to be its own special kind of torture.
There’s a bigger picture at work here, and Gunn has been unusually disciplined about protecting it. This is Chapter One of his DC Universe, the era he’s branded “Gods and Monsters,” and every piece is designed to click into the next. “Superman” opened the door. “Peacemaker” is on the air right now doing its own strange, funny, violent thing. More is already rolling down the pipe. “Man of Tomorrow” isn’t meant to be a standalone victory lap — it’s the load-bearing wall of the whole plan, the movie that has to prove the flagship can carry an entire franchise and not just one good opening weekend.
The single thing Gunn didn’t hand over is the identity of that bigger threat, the one menacing enough to force two sworn enemies to shake hands. He’s keeping that card face-down, and honestly, good. Half the fun of a two-year runway is the speculation, and a danger frightening enough to scare Lex Luthor into an alliance is, by definition, something worth being scared of. Whoever or whatever it turns out to be, the concept art already told us the real story: in “Man of Tomorrow,” the most dangerous man in the room might just be Superman’s best hope.
For a franchise that spent ten years tripping over its own feet, this is the sound of a plan actually working. A title with a point of view, a date locked on the calendar, a villain promoted to partner, and a piece of art that made a million people stop scrolling mid-thumb. July 2027 is a long way off. Gunn just made sure we’ll be chewing on it the whole way there.
What Do You Think? What is the “much bigger threat” massive enough to force Lex Luthor into a team-up with the man he has spent his entire life trying to kill — and does it crawl out of the DCU’s cosmic corner, or from somewhere much further out? If “Man of Tomorrow” really is “as much a Lex movie” as a Superman one, does making the villain a co-lead deepen the rivalry, or does it risk pulling focus off the hero in his own sequel? Now that the War Suit is confirmed, is this alliance a genuine turning point for Hoult’s Lex, or just a temporary truce he fully intends to weaponize the second the bigger threat is dealt with?
See you on the next binge!
