‘Superman’ Comes to HBO Max As the Biggest Superhero Movie of 2025. How Did DC Defeat The Marvel Machine?

Superman has flown on to HBO Max just as the superhero year comes to a close. Yes, there are more than three more months left in 2025, but there aren’t any more major superhero movies coming out this year, and it’s only appropriate that superheroes operate on a more fiscal-style timeline. Or anyway, it used to be. Superman is indeed the biggest superhero movie of the year in the United States, finishing up its domestic run with around $350 million, and very likely to remain in the top five at the end of the year. That’s a solid start for the new DC Universe – and also the lowest gross for the year’s top superhero movie since 2020, when COVID closures for most of the year gave the top superhero spot to one Harley Quinn, with Birds of Prey.

Ignoring that anomalous year, the last time the year’s biggest superhero movie made less than Superman domestically was 2014, when the biggest one was either Guardians of the Galaxy (from Superman writer-director James Gunn), or Captain America: The Winter Soldier, depending on how you define superhero. (Guardians takes place in the Marvel universe, but its characters aren’t really formally superpowered, and yet they do form a very Avengers-like team to do good, sort of… to paraphrase the other contender for 2014, we could do this all day.) Let’s not even talk about adjusting for inflation, which would probably lift either of those MCU titles past Superman, too. The last time the year’s biggest superhero was solidly less-attended is probably 2011, when Thor defaulted to #1 in a landscape still dominated by Harry Potter, Pixar, and Transformers.

I’m not pointing out any of this to run down Superman. It’s quite good, arguably the best stand-alone Superman kickoff since 1978, or maybe ever? So let’s find a more encouraging stat: This is the first DC character to claim the year’s top movie superhero slot since Wonder Woman in 2017. DC has a head start on 2026, too; the next big superhero movie in theaters will be Supergirl, a companion piece of sorts, based on one of the best superhero comics of recent years. Then again, Marvel has Spider-Man in the summer and the Avengers for Christmas, so their dominance is all but assured, even if they fail to capture the excitement of Infinity War and Endgame (which seems likely).

The real curiosity is whether the possibly-temporary triumph of Superman means anything particular in 2025. He beat out a series of real B-squadders: the Thunderbolts, a Captain America imported from TV, and – this was supposed to be Marvel’s coup de grace – the Fantastic Four, who seem to have reached the ceiling for those throwbacky characters. In other words, he didn’t have to go up against heavy-hitters like Spider-Man, Iron Man, or even his intracompany rival Batman. He’s never won a match-up like that; Superman movies were most dominant at a time when they were also the only game in town.  

What’s most striking about Superman, as so many have noted, is its willingness to begin in media res; its opening crawl, a more Gunn-like version of Star Wars exposition-drops, simply informs the audience that superheroes already exist, Superman already exists, and here he comes now, just having lost a big fight. This shouldn’t be much of a trick, given how even origin-story MCU entries (of which there are relatively few, these days) are also picking up in a universe that already has superheroes, and that the audience has probably organically experienced already. The Fantastic Four: First Steps did something similar just a few weeks after Superman, jumping to an alternate universe where the family of superheroes has been saving the day for years. Hell, Captain America: Brave New World picks up following a whole TV season’s worth of (mostly annoying) intrigue.

It’s a greater gambit for Gunn’s film to do this with a whole new DC universe, granted. But beyond the technical logistics, Superman uses its drop-in to re-adjust audience expectations about a superhero often described as too powerful, too godlike, to be truly interesting. When Man of Steel was released in 2013, it too was starting a new series of DC movies, yet it was almost immediately indebted to the enormous then-recent success of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Remember how Nolan has not just a producer credit on Man of Steel, but a story one, too, alongside his frequent Batman collaborator David S. Goyer? He quickly stepped back from DC, receiving an executive producer credit on subsequent movies directed by his pick Zack Snyder, but it was likely Man of Steel’s failure to become a Dark Knight-level phenom that caused an abrupt pivot into Batman v. Superman a few years later. Further back, Superman Returns focused heavily on its lineage, intimately connecting it to the first two Superman movies from Richard Donner and Richard Lester.

By comparison, Superman ’25 feels spectacularly unburdened, even as it introduces a whole litany of new DC characters that may or may not star in future universe endeavors. It has a clean-slate quality that’s the precise opposite of the in-joke-saturated Deadpool & Wolverine, the 2024 superhero champ, or the playfully expansive ante-upping sequel lore of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the 2023 winner. Thunderbolts, which became an also-ran despite strong reviews, feels downright weary with knowledge of that superhero life. So, in other words, Superman is a movie that feels… unburdened by what has been? To the extent that Superman feels at all in sync with the world beyond big-screen superheroes – and Gunn hedges plenty in that regard – it does gives the impression of being written with the faint assumption that the president at time of its release would not be a wannabe demagogue. The movie gestures at something fresher, more hopeful, yet still middle-of-the-road in the way that preaching “kindness” often does; it was received, then, as more gentle rebuke than bellwether of a new era.

Still, even a milquetoast potential calculation like that might seem fresh next to Marvel 37, or whatever Fantastic Four was, or like a glorious fantasy compared to the reality of this year, which somehow isn’t even over yet. To receive Superman as a balm is probably to retreat into a superhero universe that’s starting to crumble, as unconvincing as the Minecraft world that handily thrashed every single superhero at the worldwide box office this year. But at least it seems rooted in a belief that starting over is still possible.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Superman on HBO Max