The Superman Trailer Echoes One Of The Most Famous Teasers Of All Time

Warner Bros.

It's one thing to have power and weight within popular culture as a person, but it's another thing entirely when a fictional character and/or intellectual property has such power. Where individuals can easily wear out their welcome, characters and properties have the ability to be evergreen, provided the creators and artists behind them treat them well. It's usually never a good thing to assume the ubiquity of a property; even though just about every musician and TV show has a devoted, even vocal, fan base these days, the internet has allowed such niche groups to flourish while the public at large may have never heard of the things these fans are going wild over. That said, there are a select few characters in media who are just so well-known that they need little or no introduction. The DC Comics superheroes Superman and Batman are two of those characters. Sure, these days numerous people are familiar with once B-list characters like Iron Man, Black Widow, and Captain Marvel, but Superman and Batman were well known well before the comic book movie boom ever began.

The teaser trailer for the latest cinematic iteration of the adventures of Kal-El aka Clark Kent, "Superman," has dropped online today, and it's a fantastic encapsulation of the tone and creative aims that writer/director James Gunn has not just for the movie itself, but for DC Studios entirely. In addition to the radical optimism exhibited by the trailer, along with all of the glimpses of other characters and moments in the clip, there's an aspect of the teaser that may be the most surprising of all: the trailer has no title card. Ending with the DC Studios logo and the release date, the trailer never displays the name of the film. The choice is less of a gamble and more of a brazen idea, one that not only exudes confidence for the movie but recalls a similar gambit taken by Tim Burton and company in 1989, as seen in the first teaser trailer for "Batman."

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Unlike the typical Hollywood marketing machine assembly line, Gunn made a point of working closely with the editors on constructing the "Superman" trailer. At a launch event and Q+A held on the Warner Bros. lot that I attended on Monday, Gunn made sure to shout out assistant editor Ben Stringfellow for cutting together a teaser that Gunn "would show to all the visitors that came to set" while the film shot, and this clip acted as the filmmaker's "true north" for working on the now-released teaser trailer. When it came to leaving off the title card at the end, however, Gunn's response was more nonchalant when asked about the choice:

"I don't know. It just felt good. That was the other thing. We attended these trailers and they did all this testing, and so on. I believe in testing, I believe in the testing process. And we tested, we've already tested. But it's also like you have to go with your gut and what feels right. And I had some people around me, including Peter Safran, who's guts I could trust, and my own, who seems to be the, I have the narrowest of guts, meaning I'm the one who likes the least amount of things when they're put together. So it seems like it worked."

Sure, leaving a title card off of a heavily anticipated movie from a well-known director that's based on a character who's been featured in dozens of films, television shows, animated series, and other media for nearly a century doesn't quite sound gutsy on paper. Yet in the current landscape of movie marketing, it does feel like rather a bold choice, if for no other reason than it helps the teaser (and, subsequently, the film) stand out from the crowd.

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What might've "just felt good" to Gunn when it came to leaving the title card off the "Superman" teaser could relate to how the trailer doubles as a proof of concept for both the movie itself and the future of DC Studios as a whole. In other words, the teaser isn't just a regular teaser for a new film, but it's also an artistic and aesthetic mission statement. This sort of thing has been done before for reasons of duress, as with the teaser for Burton's "Batman." That production famously had to deal with pre-release controversy over the casting of Michael Keaton as the Dark Knight, and it took the rushing of a teaser trailer to theaters (while the movie was still shooting) in order to help quell fears that the director and star of "Beetlejuice" weren't making another "Batman" TV series-style comedy.

However, one needn't jump to Gotham City to see what might've influenced Gunn on the "Superman" teaser, because the teaser trailer and marketing campaign for Richard Donner's 1978 "Superman" takes a very similar approach of acknowledging the Man of Steel's importance while building anticipation for his appearance in full glory. The movie's posters most often featured a "S" shield logo, with the tagline "You'll Believe a Man Can Fly," promising the wonder that the audience would experience with the film. The teaser trailer is almost solely built around hype — there's no footage from the movie proper, and it's structured around the film's staggeringly stacked cast list. It nearly leaves off the title card in favor of the "S" shield, but the name "Superman" does appear briefly. Despite this, there's no doubt that Gunn wished to pay homage to Donner's film with his teaser, even having composer John Murphy use some of John Williams' iconic main title theme (in addition to dropping the teaser just four days after the 1978 film's 46th anniversary).

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Although the teaser for "Superman" 2025 certainly homages "Superman" 1978, the teaser trailer's net effect is much closer to the "Batman" 1989 teaser. Both teasers have a remarkable sense of anticipation and intrigue to them; "Batman" showcases the film's evocative aesthetic, while "Superman" promises a mixture of the nostalgic and the thrillingly new in its approach to the character. Even the trailers' respective taglines have an anticipatory brevity to them: "Coming This Summer" and "This Summer, It Begins."

The absence of a title card in both teasers only heightens that sense of anticipation. It makes the trailer feel somehow incomplete, thus making us crave more. It's an effective technique, and when it comes to a teaser trailer, as Gunn alluded to, it just feels appropriate. This past year, we've seen an impressive uptick in movie trailers (especially teaser trailers) re-learning the art of the tease, as opposed to aggressively (or desperately) dumping too much material in audience's laps too soon. Hopefully "It Begins" has another meaning behind it: the return of the proper, old-school teaser trailer.

"Superman" will open in theaters on July 11, 2025.