{"id":81017,"date":"2025-07-21T16:12:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T16:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/81017\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T16:12:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T16:12:10","slug":"james-gunn-says-superman-is-not-woke-anti-america-is-hurting-box-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/81017\/","title":{"rendered":"James Gunn Says Superman Is Not Woke, Anti-America Is Hurting Box Office"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJames Gunn<\/a> said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly<\/a> that he remains somewhat confused over the conservative backlash that erupted before the release of \u201cSuperman<\/a>.\u201d Fox News and other right-wing outlets branded the movie<\/a> \u201cSuperWoke\u201d after Gunn went viral for telling the Times of London that Superman is an \u201cimmigrant\u201d and \u201cthe story of America.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve heard people say it was woke, and then I\u2019ve heard a lot of people say it\u2019s not. I am curious as to what in the movie is considered woke,\u201d Gunn told EW amid \u201cSuperman\u2019s\u201d box office success. \u201cI think people took something I said\u2026The guy for the London newspaper. Originally, he said that [Superman comic creators] Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were the sons of immigrants, and they wrote Superman as an immigrant story. And I said, yeah, it\u2019s a story about an immigrant, but mostly it\u2019s a story to me about kindness, which it is. That\u2019s the center of the movie for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat\u2019s the thing we can all act upon, is kindness,\u201d the director continued. \u201cAnd so what does that lead to? Well, does that lead to the way you vote? Sure. Does that lead to everything? Yeah. Does it lead to how many people are dying from road rage? Yes. All those things are affected if people just start to value kindness. I mean, people\u00a0did\u00a0value kindness in the past. That was an American value, was kindness, and it doesn\u2019t necessarily seem to be that way to me anymore. So that was always the center of the movie for me, and it wasn\u2019t about anything other than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tGunn\u2019s initial \u201cimmigrant\u201d comment drew detractors like Fox News and Dean Cain, the former Superman actor who predicted Gunn\u2019s quote would hurt the film\u2019s box office. But Gunn also had his defenders like his brother, Sean Gunn, who\u00a0told\u00a0Variety<\/a>: \u201cYes, Superman is an immigrant, and yes, the people that we support in this country are immigrants and if you don\u2019t like that, you\u2019re not American. People who say no to immigrants are against the American way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhatever \u201cSuperWoke\u201d conservative backlash existed before the film\u2019s release, it has done nothing to deter U.S. audiences from showing up in force to movie theaters. \u201cSuperman\u201d is a bonafide box office hit domestically with a strong $235 million after two weekends of release. The film\u2019s international haul, however, is lagging behind at $171 million. Still, \u201cSuperman\u201d is at $406 million worldwide so far.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe\u2019re definitely performing better domestically than we are internationally, but internationally is also rising and having really good weekday numbers in the same way we are,\u201d Gun said in a separate interview with Rolling Stone<\/a> \u201cSo obviously the word of mouth is very positive both here and everywhere else. Which is the thing that we needed to do the most. At the same time, there are certain countries in which it\u2019s really performing well. Brazil and the U.K.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSuperman is not a known commodity in some places. He is not a big known superhero in some places like Batman is. That affects things,\u201d Gunn added. \u201cAnd it also affects things that we have a certain amount of anti-American sentiment around the world right now. It isn\u2019t really helping us. So I think it\u2019s just a matter of letting something grow. But again, for us, everything\u2019s been a total win. Having the movie come out and be something that has been embraced by people everywhere \u2014 this is just the seed of the tree that Peter and I have been watering for the past three years. So to be able to have it start off so positively has been incredibly overwhelming.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSuperman\u201d is playing in theaters nationwide from Warner Bros. and DC Studios.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James Gunn said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that he remains somewhat confused over the conservative backlash…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":47684,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[171,956,9180,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-81017","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-james-gunn","10":"tag-superman","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}