When Superman Returns came out in 2006, the film didn’t have a great reputation. It suffered from comparisons to Superman: The Movie, to which it served as a sequel, as well as Smallville, which was in its heyday at the time. Star Brandon Routh similarly took some hits after being compared unfavorably to Christopher Reeve. The movie wasn’t really judged on its own terms, in a lot of ways.
Almost 15 years later, Routh got — against all odds — to suit up as Superman again in The CW’s Crisis on Infinite Earths. The event series brought together characters from Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, and Batwoman was based on the 1980s crossover of the same name and, like that crossover, featured the destruction of the DC multiverse at the hands of the Anti-Monitor (LaMonica Garrett). As the “Arrowverse” heroes moved through the multiverse, fans got to see cameo appearances by Smallville‘s Tom Welling and Erica Durance, Batman‘s Burt Ward, Black Lightning‘s Cress Williams and many more. One such cameo — the one who got more screen time than any other — was Routh’s Superman.
In Crisis, Routh played a version of the Superman from Kingdom Come, although it was also clearly intended to be his — and therefore Christopher Reeve’s — Superman as well. In the story, some Arrowverse heroes were traveling the multiverse in search of a version of Superman who had survived more grief than any mortal man could bear. That syncs up nicely with Kingdom Come‘s backstory, in which The Joker launched a gas attack on the Daily Planet, killing most of Clark’s friends and coworkers, including Lois Lane.
While playing with the Kingdom Come costume and backstory, the episode does make it clear that this is presumably the same guy from Superman Returns, mentioning his son Jason (a character introduced in Superman Returns) and alluding to other events in the Christopher Reeve films.
Here’s the thing, though: Routh was excellent in the role — so much so that fans continued to ask producers for at least a year after Crisis if there was any chance of a spinoff, or some other way of getting a bit more of his Superman. Routh said that he himself had tried to pitch a spinoff idea, but with Superman & Lois gearing up and turmoil at Warner Bros., nothing happened.
While Routh had taken some grief early on — including for his size in the very first costume-reveal photo — it wasn’t unheard of by 2019 to argue that, while Superman Returns was flawed, Routh was a bright spot in the film. The movie always had defenders to one degree or another, but some of its one-time strengths — filmmaker Bryan Singer and Lex Luthor actor Kevin Spacey — became liabilities when both of those men were inundated with sex-abuse allegations. Unless you’re very excited about Parker Posey’s brief appearance as Miss Tessmacher, it’s really a couple of stylish set pieces and Brandon Routh’s heartfelt performance that you’ve got to appreciate these days.
More than a decade on, Routh himself thought he had more of a handle on Superman as a character by the time Crisis came around, even though he had been playing another DC superhero — The Atom — on Arrow and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow for years by that point.
“Playing the feeling, the love when you’re Superman — I didn’t know what that was when I was 25,” Routh admitted at a MegaCon panel earlier this year. “When I reprised it when I was 40, that helped, because I had been a father, and I had understood a lot more things about life, and I felt more worthy of myself, and more worthy of myself in the role, and able to be a better conduit, and tell the archetype and the story of hero and Superman. That continues to grow.”
It likely helped that the writing itself felt more “super” than it did in Returns. While Superman Returns was framed as a direct sequel to Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie and Superman II, it struggled — like all Bryan Singer movies — with its identity as a superhero film. Muted colors, moral shades of gray, and a general lack of anything distinctly “comic-booky” were among the film’s weaknesses. If you want to see how Crisis flipped that script, you need look no further than Routh’s most famous quote from the crossover.
Asked what motivated his decision to alter the classic Superman sigil, adding black to the background, Routh’s Superman says not that it was out of a sense of mourning — long considered the obvious answer for the Kingdom Come costume change — but instead that, “Even in the darkest times, hope cuts through. Hope is the light that lifts us out of darkness.”
As he says this, he is wearing a costume that is both more comics-accurate and brighter in color than his Superman Returns uniform — even with all the black highlights that come as part of the Kingdom Come package.
He also, in a nice wink and a nod to hope and tradition, replaces that black with yellow in the crossover’s final moments.
Crisis on Infinite Earths, like Superman Returns, is a complicated beast. It is not as universally beloved by Arrowverse fans as the Crisis on Earth-X crossover from two years prior, and there are plenty of arguments about whether it had too many, or too few, cameos from legacy actors reprising old roles. One thing is for sure, though: coming out of Crisis, everyone was solidly behind Brandon Routh’s Superman.
In a way, Crisis on Infinite Earths helped make it “okay” to love Superman Returns — or at least Brandon Routh’s Superman. It was a reminder that, despite years of being pretty goofy on Legends of Tomorrow, Routh was a solid dramatic actor and that his take on Superman was a unique one that nevertheless tipped its horn-rimmed glasses to what had come before.
Over the weekend, Toy Insider took to social media to reveal that upcoming McFarlane Toys listings include not just a fresh, “Deluxe Theatrical Edition” of Melissa Benoist’s Supergirl, but also of Routh’s Superman. The Superman costume will certainly be his Returns version, since only Benoist is listed as part of McFarlane’s CW collection, and it marks the first official toy release for Routh’s Superman in years.
Joining Christopher Reeve, Henry Cavill, Jack Nicholson’s Joker, and figures from the upcoming Supergirl movie, it feels like the black sheep of the Superman Family is back in the fold… And we can’t wonder if it isn’t, at least in part, due to his small-screen adventure and the big love for Routh that came after.
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