DC May Be Ditching Henry Cavill’s Superman in Continued March to the Bottom

If anything has become clear to me, it’s that DC Comics wants to have a Marvel Studios style extended universe so bad but has absolutely no plan about how to accomplish that. They have hundreds, if not thousands, of characters that have been created for the company over the years, but their entire film strategy seems to revolve around making dozens of movies about The Joker and Harley Quinn.

Furthering the narrative that DC’s film division has its head entirely shoved up its collective ass is news today in The Hollywood Reporter that Henry Cavill is out as Superman, mainly because he wouldn’t do a cameo in the forthcoming Zachary Levi Shazam! movie.

Warners had been trying to enlist Cavill, who most recently co-starred in Mission: Impossible — Fallout, for a Superman cameo in Shazam!, which stars Zachary Levi and will bow April 5. But contract talks between Cavill’s WME reps and the studio broke down, and the door is now closing on other potential Superman appearances.

That’s because Warners has shifted its focus to a Supergirl movie, which will be an origin story featuring a teen superheroine. This effectively removes an actor of Cavill’s age from the storyline’s equation given that Superman, aka Kal-El, would be an infant, according to DC lore.

This doesn’t make any sense unless the movie is set on Krypton, but Kara Zor-El wasn’t a hero on Krypton when Kal-El was an infant. She was sent with Kal-El to be his guardian as she is 16 years older than him, but due to comic book things happening, she didn’t arrive on Earth until about 30 years after her infant cousin, and he was already Superman while she was still a teen. And honestly, we don’t need another anything set on Kypton. It’s not a particularly interesting part of the Superman mythos, the interesting part of it is that we only learn bits and pieces of Superman’s lost homeland.

Cavill kind of addressed the report on his Instagam, posting this video.

Superman shirt, Superman toy… maybe he’s not out after all? Maybe he’ll play The Joker in Judd Apatow’s Jokin’ Around.