The Big Red W

I was lying on the 22nd floor of The Standard1 I was three martinis up the Hudson and surfing YouTube when the new Superman trailer dropped. This one:

This trailer hit me hard. The prior Superman, as we’ll read about in a moment, was a watered-down meh version of the hero. This brand-new take on my favorite hero introduced Henry Cavill and a completely new theme song, which I will now explain was a really big deal.

Two Themes

Including the forthcoming Superman from James Gunn, we have 10 Superman movies since the first was released in 1978. Here’s your first fun fact: there are only two theme songs in all of those movies.

Superman (1978)

Released the year after Star Wars, Superman helped cement the launch of the modern blockbuster era that George Lucas had begun. The John William’s theme has two parts that you can’t unhear: the main fanfare and then the unforgettable march.

John Williams, my friends, is at the top of his game. It’s a great movie. In the pre-CGI world, I believed Superman could fly, but like Star Wars before it, the massive main theme elevates the whole picture.

Superman II (1980)

Cracks in the Superman franchise appeared in an OK sequel. Richard Donner, the director of the first movie, shot much of the second movie during the first. He had creative differences with producers and was fired. Major reshoots occurred to get the new Director his director credit, and the result was a semi-chopped-together kind’a OK film.

The theme? 100% John Williams.

Superman III (1983) & Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)

Superman III was awful. Superman IV was a please-make-it-stop situation. The Salkinds, the producers, proved definitively that Richard Donner was the reason the first movie flew.

The theme for both? 100% John Williams. Still.

Superman Returns (2006)

The last two movies were so bad that they waited almost a decade before releasing another movie. The last two movies were so bad that Superman Returns was written to ignore Superman III and IV. It was set after the events of the second film. Superman had spent five years in space doing… something, and now he returns.

Director Bryan Singer was aiming for a homage, but ended up with a two-and-a-half-hour confusing mess. Luthor was building an island… out of kryptonite? What? Superman is a deadbeat Dad? The good news is that the main theme is a lightly polished version of the original John Williams score.

The score didn’t help. The movie bombed, and we didn’t see Superman again on the big screen for another seven years.

Man of Steel (2013)

This is the movie that dared to introduce a new theme:

Given the multi-decade dominance of the Williams theme, I was surprised, like you, when I heard a new main theme for Man of Steel. There’s no fanfare in the Zimmer theme. It builds slowly, it’s less complex, but when the hero arrives, you hear it. Zimmer famously hired the world’s best drummers to bang out the percussion parts of this work of art.

I asked Spotify how many times I’ve listened to this theme song since 2013, and Spotify told me, “Bro. You don’t want to know.”

The movie? Zack Snyder. What are you going to do…

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Justice League (2017), Zach Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

These mostly forgettable visual feasts did not advance either theme, other than incorporating bits and pieces of both William’s score and Zimmer’s score into an otherwise unremarkable larger score. These movies were peak DC losing its way. Wonder Woman was fantastic, and Aquaman was promising, but the movies that combined the heroes lost track of the characters’ hearts. They focused on spectacle rather than genuinely cared for stories.

Superman (2025)

This article exists because of the recent introduction of this movie’s theme. The stakes could not be higher for James Gunn, who reboots (again) the DC Universe with the launch of his Superman. His increasingly compelling trailers showcase Gunn’s signature style. It’s a group of oddballs with a lot of feelings. Krypto is there, and he’s a mutt? Whole thing looks… busy and kind’a weird? But, remember, this is the same guy who made you fall in love with a raccoon and his tree sidekick. We’ll see.

But we don’t have to wait on the theme.

It’s smart. We’ve got the march, we’ve got the heroic build, and then we’ve got the five defining notes from the original William’s theme. BOOM. Homage. Big theme swing for a big movie. Much luck, Mr. Gunn2.

The Big Red W

I wrote this piece lying on the bed semi-martini-drunk, playing the first Man of Steel theme on repeat. At the time, I wrote:

My family loves Superman because he is an unrealistic and impossible creature. We know that. We know he sets an impossible bar, but we need that bar because that is how we dream big, that is how we aspire to something great, and that is why we choose hope.

Across the Hudson from The Standard is the W hotel in New Jersey. At the top of the hotel is a big red illuminated W. I’ve stayed at the hotel many times. Two different start-ups had me flying to New York frequently, and I always asked for a river-facing view because all I wanted to do was have a couple of drinks and stare at that big red W.

Great Gatsby, right? He’s staring across the sound at the green light because that’s her. Daisy. Tragic optimism. That’s me. Tragically optimistic. Tragically hopeful. Endlessly.

My heroes are strong, consistent, and kind. Their themes loudly declare our optimism.

Yeah, the same place I met that giraffe ↩

Here’s a link to all of the themes. ↩