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    The more James Gunn’s Superman is a hit, the more the right will want its own Dean Cain of steel

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    It’s almost impossible to divide superheroes along political lines. Captain America might seem like a patriotic, commie-bashing lunatic, as he was in the 1950s comics during the McCarthy era, until you remember that he has also spent much of his fictional career telling corrupt government agencies to shove it. And, in the Marvel Comic Universe, at least, he went on the run rather than sign up for an authoritarian superhero registry. Superman was once the square-jawed poster boy for US exceptionalism, cheerfully posing on propaganda comic covers urging readers to buy war bonds, but he’s also been written as a Kansas farm boy so suspicious of concentrated power that in one storyline he renounced his citizenship to avoid being used as a pawn of US foreign policy.Bar a few outliers – Iron Man cheerleading the military-industrial complex in his earliest comics springs to mind – trying to pin a superhero to one side of the political spectrum is like trying to staple fog: most of DC and Marvel’s big beasts will drift wherever the story, or the writer’s mortgage payments, takes them. Which is why it’s been so bizarre watching the right’s disgust as a vaguely woke man of steel drives all before him at the summer box office.James Gunn’s Superman passed the half-billion-dollar mark globally this week, which hardly means we’re looking at a film to mirror the success of the early comic book movie era – Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice somehow made $874m, for chrissakes – but does at least indicate that audiences quite like this new, down-to-earth, kindly and human take on Kal-El. Gunn is now producing next Wonder Woman.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, on the dystopian side of the news cycle, Dean Cain has declared himself primed and ready to join Donald Trump’s Ice agency. Cain (Kal-El in 90s TV series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman) only recently declared his horror at how “woke” the new David Corenswet Supes has turned out to be. Are these two things connected? Is Cain trying to make the point that a real “superman” would be standing at America’s borders, demanding paperwork from asylum seekers and Frisbeeing their lunch into the nearest bin, rather than attempting to stop evil invaders from terrorising a rival nation (as Corenswet does in Superman)?It’s almost as if, in the absence of the kind of superhero movies Cain would like to see muscle their way into multiplexes, the actor sees it as his patriotic duty to bring hard-border fiction into reality. If the 74 million who voted for Trump don’t want these woke Marvel and DC superhero movies, and would really rather see films in which caped crusaders defend gated communities against suspiciously accented delivery drivers, isn’t Hollywood missing a trick? Isn’t there – somewhere – a gap in the market, or perhaps an alternative reality – Earth 45? Earth-Fox News? – where filmgoers queue around the block to watch Captain Constitution and the Stand Your Ground Squad, and the Hollywood trades wax lyrical about a new blockbuster era of paranoia and punitive zoning laws?The right has tried this already, of course. Cain was also pretty upset about Disney’s recent “woke” Snow White remake, perhaps because the princess didn’t spend the runtime pining for a man or whistling while she ironed. And so was conservative media outfit the Daily Wire, which at the height of the backlash against Rachel Zegler’s casting made a trailer for a then-forthcoming rival film titled Snow White and the Evil Queen.Plot details were thin on the ground, but presumably involved the heroine abandoning woodland animals for a concealed-carry permit and learning the value of hard work by running her own small business into the ground without government subsidies. We’ll never really know because the film appears to have been quietly cancelled, leaving a potential audience of millions bereft of the chance to see what happens when you trade magic mirrors for voter ID checkpoints.View image in fullscreenPerhaps the lesson here is that it’s just really difficult to make dreamy-eyed fantasy flicks that double as Breitbart comment threads. And it’s not just superhero movies that would creak under the strain. Imagine Star Wars if rebellions were built not on hope but on stricter border controls and mandatory midichlorian checks. Would The Lord of the Rings have really been quite the same if all those ’orrible orcs and trolls had been replaced on the battlefield by desperate migrants trying to reach the Shire, being enthusiastically biffed by an over-xcited Aragorn and Gimli counting down the number of “illegals” they just tonked?Sooner or later, someone’s going to make a superhero film or TV series that gives the Maga crowd everything: a caped crusader who fights windfarms, sues the Daily Planet for libel and pays for everything in gold bullion or crypto. (The Boys got close at times: Homelander is basically what happens when you cross Captain America with a Trump rally and a gallon of unpasteurised milk, but he was hardly a hero – and perhaps that’s the point.)Until then, the culture warriors will have to settle for grumbling about woke elves and lady Thor while the rest of us watch Superman save the world from the nastiest supervillains in the universe without checking anyone’s passport. More

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      ‘Another woke disaster from Hollywood!’ How Captain America joined the culture wars

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      Of all the times to recast the most iconically American comic-book character with a Black actor and then pit him against a violently angry supervillain with an unnaturally reddish skin tone, who also happens to be the new US president … Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but it is in the trailer for the new Captain America: Brave New World, just released into a tumultuous Trump-run America that’s itching for another culture war.If Marvel was looking for some attention to reignite its beleaguered movie franchise, it seems to have found it – but not necessarily the good kind. If nothing else, the image of a raging red superbeing rising up from behind the presidential podium and then trashing the White House is sure to provoke a reaction. As Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson takes up the star-spangled shield passed on to him by Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers, his casting has already incensed a certain bracket of social media: “The new Captain America! DEI hire!”; “Sounds like another woke disaster from Hollywood”; “Boy, did you not get the memo? America just voted for Trump – your film is dead on arrival.” It’s a wonder Trump hasn’t signed an executive order banning the film yet.Mackie gave his adversaries even more ammunition a couple of weeks ago when he told the Italian press: “To me Captain America represents a lot of different things and I don’t think the term ‘America’ should be one of those representations.” Again, you can imagine the reactions – even if, as fans pointed out, Mackie’s predecessor in the role, Chris Evans, made very similar comments when he was promoting Captain America: “I’m not trying to get too lost in the American side of it. This isn’t a flag-waving movie,” Evans said in 2011. Mackie had to walk back his comments the next day on Instagram: “Let me be clear about this: I’m a proud American and taking on the shield of a hero like Cap is the honour of a lifetime.”These are not the only battles the new Captain America finds itself caught up in. Attention has also focused on Ruth Bat-Seraph, aka Sabra, a minor character in the movie played by Israeli actor Shira Haas. In the original comics, Sabra was “the first Israeli superhero”; a mutant with superpowers who was formerly a Mossad agent. She’s had a bit of a makeover for the movie: no longer a mutant or a Mossad agent but very much a combat-ready operative. In a joint letter, some Palestinian cultural groups complained: “By reviving this racist character in any form, Marvel is promoting Israel’s brutal oppression of Palestinians.” They have called for a boycott of the movie, and pro-Palestinian protesters picketed the Hollywood premiere this Tuesday, holding up signs saying things such as “Disney supports genocide” – again, necessarily not the good kind of attention.View image in fullscreenAs if that weren’t enough, Brave New World has been plagued by reports of rewrites and reshoots, as well as recastings. William Hurt, who was set to play the US president, Thaddeus Ross, died in 2022 and had to be replaced by Harrison Ford. It was originally slated for release in May 2024. According to one insider, late last year it had gone through three rounds of test screenings and was still getting negative feedback. The film-makers have denied this, although director Julius Onah acknowledged: “Every movie of this scale has additional photography baked into the creative process. There are things you’re going to refine and the story is going to evolve.”Without those delays, the movie might well have come out in the late Biden era, rather than the febrile first few weeks of Trump 2.0. At least they changed the title – the original, Captain America: New World Order might have been too much for the conspiracy theorists to handle.It was somehow inevitable that all this would befall Captain America, rather than any other superhero. He’s always been the moral conscience of the Marvel universe, and by extension, the nation. The character was created by Jewish writers Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in 1940, primarily as a wartime propaganda tool – the US actually entered the war a year later, so perhaps it worked. The cover of issue #1, showing Captain America socking Adolf Hitler on the jaw, told you exactly where his loyalties lay. Now, 85 years later, we find him socking the fictional US president in the jaw instead. And this at a time when the real-life president is happily dining with white supremacists and Nazi sympathisers such as Nick Fuentes and Kanye West (whose recent X post declaring “I’m a Nazi” ought to clear up any ambiguity). Not to mention Trump’s ubiquitous righthand troll Elon Musk, who has done nothing at all to correct impressions that he gave a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration a few weeks ago. It leaves you wondering who the real good guys are.View image in fullscreenTime and again, it’s been down to Captain America to figure that out. While other Marvel movies have gadded about in weightless fantasy realms (Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool), the Captain America movies have often reflected off-screen political reality – and despite his ludicrously patriotic get-up (often worn by Trump supporters, or Photoshopped on to Trump himself), Cap has never been afraid to turn against his own government.It’s worth recapping the saga so far. Origin movie Captain America: The First Avenger, released in 2011, explained how weedy army recruit Steve Rogers (Evans) was given an experimental superhero-creating serum in the 1940s, and riffed on his deployment as a wartime propaganda mascot. Things got interesting with 2014’s The Winter Soldier, in which Rogers is thawed out in the present day and finds the US about to instate a global surveillance regime that would predict and preemptively eliminate threats. This was the era of the Edward Snowden leaks, so the paranoid conspiracy element was not too difficult to swallow. But good old Cap wasn’t having it: “This isn’t freedom – it’s fear,” he said, stepping away from his quasi-military role. He was right: it later transpired that the US government had been infiltrated by the neo-Nazi organisation Hydra – again, a concept that’s no longer too difficult to swallow.And by his side in his fight to de-Nazify the government was Mackie’s character, Sam Wilson, aka Falcon, a modern-day Iraq war veteran who befriended Rogers. In 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, Rogers and Wilson again fell out with the authorities, refusing to agree to UN oversight of “enhanced individuals” – those with superpowers. They trusted their own judgment above that of the politicians.View image in fullscreen2019’s all-conquering Avengers: Endgame culminated with Evans’ Captain America retiring, and passing on his shield to Mackie’s Falcon. After that the saga headed into race politics and Black history – possibly blown in that direction by the cultural winds post-Black Lives Matter. In his small-screen spin-off Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Falcon hands the shield back to the government – “It feels like it belongs to someone else,” he says. Not only does he deem himself unworthy, his patriotism to a country that enslaved and discriminated against his forebears is understandably conflicted. Another Black character tells him: “They will never let a Black man be Captain America, and even if they did, no self-respecting Black man would ever want to be.” Sure enough, a new, white Captain America is anointed: John Walker, played by Wyatt Russell. But to cut a long story short, it turns out he’s unworthy, and Wilson ultimately winds up with the shield again.Politics were very much in the minds of the Russo brothers, who jointly directed Winter Soldier, Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. “Those movies are very much about what went on in this country over the past four years,” Joe Russo told me in 2021. “Some of the worst people were being attracted to politics and were representing us collectively … We believed strongly that the reach in those movies was so significant that they could be influential in helping people potentially make better decisions. We thought that they were a really powerful tool, at exactly the right time.”Brave New World should at least satisfy fans who wanted a political action thriller along the lines of Winter Soldier, with no space people turning up from parallel universes. Mackie’s fledgling Cap initially agrees to work with Ford’s new president, but before long, he’s disobeying orders and going rogue once again to investigate a conspiracy. Despite the raging Hulk “reveal”, and the president surviving an assassination attempt, Ford’s character is not all that Trump-like: he cares about international cooperation, he has a Black female head of security, and he even gets on an exercise bike on Air Force One. Depending on how you see it, this is either a bullet dodged or a punch pulled. This president does, however, outsource tech and military innovation to a shifty, unbiddable genius scientist who’s described as “his own personal thinktank” – remind you of anyone?There’s no telling how any of this will play in today’s movie landscape. Marvel movies have been at the vanguard of Hollywood representation in recent years but this has not translated into box-office success lately. Recent movie outings such as The Eternals and The Marvels – neither of which were directed by or centred on white men – were met with opposition by some fans (especially the vehement “Everything is woke” brigade), but also by some critics (for not being very good). Meanwhile, Marvel’s franchise-milking small-screen offshoots (Loki, Wandavision, Ms Marvel, She-Hulk, etc) and confusing “multiverse” storylines have turned off even more viewers. It’s telling that Marvel’s only recent box-office success was the more flip and irreverent Deadpool & Wolverine (led by two white guys).View image in fullscreenSo perhaps the message is: nobody’s in the mood for superheroes getting too real and political any more, and the era of applauding movies for representation has been killed by Trump’s anti-DEI edicts. Marvel seems to be hedging its bets: next up, in April, is Thunderbolts – the first outing for a new bunch of (overwhelmingly white) superhero misfits, including Florence Pugh and Wyatt Russell’s John Walker.But ultimately, Mackie was right when he said Captain America was not really about “America”. Unlike the cosplaying Trump supporters, he’s more loyal to American values than to the flag, and over his long history, he’s often had to remind the nation what those values are. In one comic-book story (What If … #44), 1940s Captain America wakes up in 1984, where he finds a fascist “America first” president who is persecuting minorities and promising to make America great again. Cap lays it down in no uncertain terms: “Without its ideals – its commitment to the freedom of all men, America is a piece of trash! I fought Adolf Hitler not because America was great, but because it was fragile! I knew that liberty could as easily be snuffed out here as in Nazi Germany!” Maybe they can use that storyline for the next movie, if there is one. More

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      in US Politics

      If I were Captain America, I’d quit | Stewart Lee

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      The presidency of Donald Trump contaminates everything that touches it, like dogshit on the end of a pointed stick. Be careful, politicians of the world, entertainment brands, and commercial properties, that you don’t get any on you. It stinks.On Monday night, one of my lovely rescue cats, having battled the cat flap into submission, disappeared in the stupid firework dark. He’s not back yet and I am very sad. Like me, he was abandoned to his fate as a child, but in a cardboard box outside the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ place rather than in the Children’s Society offices in Lichfield (a town from which I have been banned from performing by the mayor’s office since 1990). Dependent, like me, on the kindness of a chain of strangers, the cat’s arrival and survival felt like a small balancing of the book of life. But maybe, like many millions of us worldwide, he just couldn’t face Wednesday morning.Last week, Robert Jenrick, our new shadow justice secretary, was trying to blame Keir Starmer for the early release of sex offenders from the very prisons his own government had carelessly overcrowded; another mess left for someone else to pick up. The Tories spent 14 years treating the whole country like a teenager’s bedroom. I only went in to gather up all the old coffee cups, and ended up tripping over a series of abandoned infrastructure projects and falling into a vast network of sewage-filled waterways.But, one has to ask, if Jenrick’s so worried about sex offenders being on the loose, why is he so pleased that one is now in the White House? “If I were an American citizen, I would be voting for Donald Trump”, the child-hating sod told GB News’s calcified opinion-vampire Camilla Tominey, Britain’s 49th most influential rightwing figure, in September. It looks like it’s one rule for white working class British rapists and quite another for orange American billionaire sex offenders with their fingers on the nuclear codes. Two-tier Jenrick can do one! Accommodating Donald Trump will invalidate us all.This week, Bob Dylan is at the Royal Albert Hall. I couldn’t buy a ticket, and wasn’t about to pay five times over the odds to one of the Tories’ ticket criminals. But I may go down to Kensington and hang around outside hopefully, like a dog, in case another middle-aged man with an opinion about the relative merits of the five extant takes of She’s Your Lover Now wants to sell a sudden spare to “the world’s greatest living standup comedian” (the Times).I would like to see Bob Dylan one more time, at least, but wonder what it would feel like to watch one of the architects of postwar progressive America performing in a world where the culture he helped create is so obviously in retreat, as a sexual abuser reclines in Washington inflating himself like a bulbous brown toad. One thing you can say about Dylan, who rarely offers the casual fan the opportunity to enjoy any of his back catalogue live without a significant ontological struggle, is that he was never a nostalgia act. Well, he is now. Trump has moved the dial and made him into one. The times they are a-changing. But not in a good way.Since the second world war, America’s most powerful tool has been the soft global diplomacy of its irresistible, and broadly liberal, popular culture – rock’n’ roll, cinema, and latterly the comic-book characters that are now the tentpoles of the international entertainment industry. But how do those American icons make sense in a Trumpian world, where the star-spangled iconography that informs their costumes is now redolent of fascism and climate denialism rather than freedom and the future? Nobody would want their child to be saved from a burning building by Swastika-Chest Man and his kid sidekick Drill Baby.Because working-class Jewish autodidact visionaries, producing the pop art primers of tomorrow on a pittance, drew Captain America punching out Hitler in the early 40s, and because formerly one-dimensional superheroes were made thrillingly two-dimensional by acid-fried college dropout creatives in the 60s and 70s, Marvel Comics, though their roots are obscured, remain broadly liberal, even almost countercultural. That’s how I reverse-engineer my infantilised pseudo-intellectual desire to keep reading them at the age of 56, anyway.Indeed, in September 1963, Jack Kirby, the 12-cent William Blake of the Lower East Side, drew the Fantastic Four fighting the Hate-Monger, a villain whose superpowers were not the ability to control soil or infuriate moles, but the ability to whip up hate. “We must drive all the foreigners back where they came from. We must show no mercy to those we hate,” he cries, in his purple hood, as his followers agree – “Long live the Hate-Monger. He’ll clean up this country for us!” – and the Invisible Girl observes, helpfully: “He seems to have the crowd in a trance. They … they’re agreeing with his un-American sentiments.” Hang on! Was that Fantastic Four Issue 21, 61 years ago, or Sky News last week?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionScarlett Johansson, Marvel’s Black Widow, pointlessly assembled a squadron of Avengers actors to denounce Trump, arguably emphasising America’s divides, but the real Avengers would oppose Trump. If they existed. In 1974, as Watergate’s curtain fell on Nixon, the comics writer Steve Englehart, a former soldier who became a conscientious objector, had Captain America abandon his costume and take on the identity of Nomad (“the man without a country”) because he couldn’t square the fictional character’s values with his country’s corrupt figurehead. My Captain America would not sling his vibranium shield for Donald Trump. The success of Trump invalidates the shared, if naive, notion of what America is. I’m going to look for my cat.Stewart Lee’s 2025 tour Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulfbegins at London’s Leicester Square theatre this December, with a July Royal Festival Hall run just announced.

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      in US Politics

      Avengers stars assemble to endorse Kamala Harris – by brainstorming an election catchphrase

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      The cast of Marvel’s Avengers movies have come out in support of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris less than a week before the US election.In a video posted first on Vanity Fair on Thursday evening, actors Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Don Cheadle, Chris Evans, Danai Gurira and Paul Bettany playfully riffed on their respective characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe while encouraging viewers to vote for Harris.The video, which runs for just over 90 seconds, opens with the actors taking an incoming video call from Johansson. On screen, they brainstorm ideas for a catchphrase for Harris, landing on the dubious “Down with Democracy”, which they spin into a brief Marvel-style Harris/Walz campaign video with dramatic music and comic-style graphics. The final frame of the video encourages viewers to vote on November 5.Sharing the video on X, Ruffalo, a vocal Democrat supporter who is best known for his role as the Hulk, wrote: “Don’t sit this one out. It’s the one where we will lose big: Project 2025, women’s reproductive rights, climate change, LGBTQIA+ rights, public education, student debt relief, Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and as of today, life saving vaccines. This shit is real and it’s going to come for you.”Speaking to Vanity Fair about the making of the video, Johansson, who played Black Widow in the Marvel films, said, “It just immediately turned into people trying to one-up each other with one-liners,” and joked that Downey Jr and Ruffalo were “bickering like two old ladies. And, of course, I’m the person that’s just trying to organise everybody. It’s very similar to what our dynamic is in the films. It was wonderful to feel everybody assemble around it, and hopefully it will engage our fans in the process of voting.”Johansson initiated the project, reaching out to her fellow MCU alumni via their group chat and reminding them: “We’ve got a lot of powerful people on this thread, and it would be great to unite … in hopefully creating a bit of a viral moment for Kamala.”The Avengers cast join a list of celebrities who have endorsed the Harris/Walz campaign, including Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen and Oprah. In the last week alone, Beyoncé, Madonna, Bad Bunny, Ricky Martin, LeBron James and the former Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger have all come out in support of Harris. More