Wed, August 12, 2026 at 6:16 PM UTC
If you’re old enough to have witnessed Christopher Reeves’ Man of Steel reverse Earth’s rotation to rescue Lois Lane on the big screen (like me), it was a pretty cool moment. It is also, as of this month, no longer possible inside DC canon. DC Comics has confirmed that Supermancannot fly fast enough to reverse time, ironically reversing one of the more iconic superhero movie moments.
The clarification arrives in Batman/Superman: World’s Finest 2026 Annual #1, which is <a href="https://screenrant.com/superman-time-travel-flight-power-change/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>now available. In the issue, Batman, Superman and the Flashend up trapped in a Faraday cage with no obvious escape. Barry Allen starts brainstorming and floats an old idea, spinning fast enough to turn back the clock. Superman dismisses the suggestion as nonsense, and Batman rejects it just as flatly.
It comes off as an inside joke and the target is clear. It specifically references the end of 1978’s Superman, the moment Christopher Reeve’s hero flies around the Earth at tremendous speed after Lois Lane dies in an earthquake, spinning the planet backward until time reverses and she lives. Directed by Richard Donner and co-starring Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor and Marlon Brando as Jor-El, the film sold audiences on its promise that “you’ll believe a man can fly.” And its final minutes delivered a new superpower that would be part of Superman’s pop-culture DNA for decades.
Writer Mark Waid and artist Dan Mora have run World’s Finest as a continuity-light celebration of DC’s two biggest icons since the series launched in 2022. This issue folds into a wider effort at the publisher to smooth out lore inconsistencies and settle the questions longtime readers keep circling back to. Whether Superman reversed time or merely reversed the Earth’s rotation has been one of the most persistent of those debates, argued in comment sections and at conventions for years.
Of course, this doesn’t actually rewrite the 1978 film. That version of the story will stick around, complete with Reeve’s flight around the Earth. But don’t expect to see Clark Kent trying to turn back time that way in the future now that the official DC rules state plainly that super-speed and time travel are two different things for the Man of Steel, no matter how fast he flies.
This story was originally published byParadeon Aug 12, 2026, where it first appeared in theNewssection. Add Parade as aPreferred
