Man of Tomorrowrecently wrapped production, and it looks to be setting up one of the greatest superhero team up movies of all time. The characters surrounding Superman are starting to form a pretty specific team from DC history, and technically they are the Justice League. Just, maybe not the big seven fans have come to expect. The Justice Gang may have started as a corporate-backed collection of heroes, but James Gunn has already described the gang as a nascent Justice League. The League has had many iterations over the years, but many fans remember the big seven from the Justice League cartoon and Grant Morrison’s ’90s JLA run. That doesn’t appear to be Gunn’s favored lineup, at least based on who he’s included in the DCU. In past interviews, Gunn has referred to Justice League International as a favorite comic run and his JL lineup is proving it. So far we have confirmed Guy Gardner, Blue Beetle, Hawkgirl, Supergirl, Mister Terrific, and a mystery woman played by Adria Arjona that most people are assuming is Wonder Woman. The man bankrolling these heroes is Maxwell Lord, a billionaire that wants to do the right thing, but lets his mouth get in the way.
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A fan on Threads recently asked James Gunn why the Green Lantern Corps would allow Guy Gardner to work for Maxwell Lord if the billionaire is evil. As Gunn is wont to do, he gently rejected the premise of the question entirely. The filmmaker said that his take on Maxwell Lord is based on the original “deeply flawed, but hardly malevolent Max.” Also calling Lord one of his favorite characters, Gunn has given audiences a taste of the billionaire’s sometimes caustic personality in both his cutting takedown of Lex and his mishandling of potential team members in Peacemaker.
“Who said he was evil? The DCU is not a xerox of DC Comics. It’s an alternate universe. But as a hint, I’m a huge fan of the deeply flawed but hardly malevolent Max as originally created by DeMatteis, Giffen, and Maguire, not the less nuanced evil dude he was retconned into. The original Max as presented in JLI was one of my favorite characters.”
Maxwell Lord is Not Evil
Played by Sean Gunn in Superman, Maxwell Lord has a complicated comics history. When he became a major part of the Justice League in the late ’80s, he wasn’t exactly a saint among the heroes. He was ambitious, manipulative, self-serving and frequently bent the truth to advance his plans. He also genuinely cared about the team around him. Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, and Kevin Maguire created Justice League International to be a more humanistic take on superhero teams. Leaning into the rich serialized stories made popular in Chris Claremont’s X-Men run, JLIpivoted DC’s top-billed super team into a group of outsiders that formed more of a family instead of a corps of on-call super-powered soldiers. The messy characters had human reactions and occasionally coarse personalities. Sometimes the teammates just straight up didn’t like each other. Guy Gardner grated on his teammates to the point that Batman knocked him out with one punch just to get him to shut up. The rest of the team looked on in appreciation. They were a complicated but good natured team. Sean Gunn has described him as, “Not evil incarnate the way that Lex is.”
The dynamic changed abruptly in Countdown to Infinite Crisis, the DC crossover-event that lead into a super-mega event that frankly got very confusing. In the pre-event event, Maxwell Lord is revealed to have been manipulating the superhero community for years and is actually an arch villain that always hated the heroes he paid. This is proven for readers when Maxwell Lord kills Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle. The change made Lord into a Lex Luthor knock-off and took away any redeeming qualities the character had built up in his previous existence.
The character eventually takes mental control of Superman. When confronted by Wonder Woman and bound by the lasso of truth, Lord claims he will never let the hero free from his mental grip. Wonder Woman processes that information and snaps Lord’s neck. The moment sent shockwaves through the fandom for both Wonder Woman’s nonchalant killing of a major DC character, but also because the new backstory for Maxwell Lord made no sense to fans of JLI. It also didn’t make sense to James Gunn. “Max was retconned as a sort of muscular evildoer after originally being conceived by J.M. DeMatteis as a multi-layered character who was morally gray. Along with skinny Amanda Waller, it wasn’t one of my favorite comic reimaginings. Our Max is inspired by the original version. So don’t be waiting for him to shoot Blue Beetle in the face.”
Correcting a Character Assasination
Zack Snyder would famously recreate the moment in Man of Steel, replacing Wonder Woman and Lord with Superman and General Zod. Snyder essentially lifted the exact moral dilemma of the Wonder Woman/Max Lord panel and swapped the character geometry from Diana and Max to Clark and Zod. Lord also appeared as a “villain” in Wonder Woman ’84, but had no real connection to his comic counterpart and functioned more as a catalyst than antagonist.
James Gunn’s perspective that the DCU isn’t a xerox copy of the DC Comics leaves plenty of room for new interpretations of characters. It also gives him room to assemble a Justice League that is entirely his own. So far he’s picked members of the JSA (Mister Terrific), JLI (Guy Gardner, Blue Beetle), and the traditional JLA to fill out his super team. But those aren’t the only Justice League International breadcrumbs. A Mister Miracle animated series has been announced from Lanternswriter Tom King. The series will seeNathan Fillion’s Guy Gardner reuniting with his JLI teammate in some capacity. That pairs two characters closely associated with the classic JLI roster while also putting King, who previously revisited the team in a Human Target series, directly in the middle of another DCU project.
James Gunn has not been shy about the fact that he loves the bigger, sillier era of DC comics that existed before the events of Knightfalland The Death of Superman. His commitment to preventing Maxwell Lord’s character assassination on film proves that love. Hopefully, that trend will continue as we see the DCU’s heroes form alliances that will drive the in-universe storytelling. Gunn’s public influences brought humanity and personality to DC’s biggest heroes, now he gets to do the same thing for their cinematic counterparts.
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